


CrossRoads

by awabubbles



Category: Supernatural, Supernatural/Torchwood, Superwho - Fandom, Superwood - Fandom, Torchwood
Genre: Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Dark, F/M, Gen, M/M, Mystery, Road Trips, Superwho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-11-25 23:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 76,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/644041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awabubbles/pseuds/awabubbles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Jack finally returns to Earth after the 456 incident and turns to UNIT for help rebuilding Torchwood. While working for their New York division he finds a conspiracy deeper and darker than he could have ever imagined.</p><p>Sam Winchester is still reeling from the loss of his brother and following a wicked path with no end. He discovers a green-eyed demon that proves difficult to hunt and even harder to kill but its true objectives lead Sam to a strange man and a difficult decision.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. On the Road Again

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set Post CoE, pre Miracle Day for Jack, and between series 3 and 4 for Sam. 
> 
> There's canon-typical blood, violence, and language. Eventual Sam/Jack implications.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__

_Crossroads: the point at which two roads meet; where an important decision must be made._

 

**Ch 1 On the Road Again**

 

A red sun and a dark military land-and-sea vehicle rose simultaneously out of the ocean. The vehicle’s tan hull glistened bright as it burst from the water and drug itself up onto the naked, white sand. Ten soldiers clad in navy jumped from its bowels and marched smartly onto the beach, their brilliant red caps adorned with UNIT’s insignia--the earth with a pair of extended wings--bobbing in unison. Another amphibious vehicle emerged behind them and soon the seashore was crawling with soldiers, commanding shouts, and habitual ‘yes sirs’.

Sandy Hook was closed this morning so New York’s UNIT team could run this drill, timing how quickly they could evacuate from Coney Island in Brooklyn, across the Bay, and onto the beaches of this small peninsula in New Jersey. Further inland sat Fort Hancock, a former US Army base at Sandy Hook that had been decommissioned since 1974. At least that’s what the public had been told. Beneath the park grounds UNIT had created an underground facility where they stored weapons and ammunitions; some if it man-made, most of it not. Fort Hancock was one of many secret holdings that had been created within the last year.

General Erisa, the head of UNIT's New York division, greeted her troops emerging from the Raritan Bay with calm pride, observing this morning’s drill atop a grass-covered dune. She was an inflexible woman with dark ebony skin in a clean-pressed suit, a tight-lipped frown, and nothing out of place. She had large, expressive eyes, but the only emotion they were capable of expressing was austerity so she exuded an almost exaggerated kind of sternness. She had met the Doctor twice, once as a Captain in London and then with Martha Jones in Greenwich Park. It was an invisible badge she wore and it was impossible to ignore the hyper-inflated sense of personal importance that came with it.

“We’re in a renaissance era of weapons research and development," the General began. "Our ability to defend this planet can no longer be questioned and our ability to respond to other nations in need is always improving. For example, in the course of 48 hours we can deploy our New York regiment to any country in the world and that would include the time it took to transport heavy artillery.”

A pair of reclining chairs and a folding wooden table had been set into the sand. The General had chosen to stand and monitor her soldiers pouring onto the beach, but behind her sat Captain Jack Harkness, the ex-leader of Torchwood. Or perhaps, more aptly put: the leader of ex-Torchwood.

“Am I supposed to be impressed?” In his right hand the Captain held a glass of lemonade garnished with a gaudy pink umbrella. Periodically he would fidget with the umbrella.

“It’s your one complaint with us, is it not? That UNIT is too strictly bound by government and even to the United Nations. But those ties are breaking and we’re becoming…how would _you_ put it, ‘outside the government, beyond the police’?”

“Very cute.” Jack’s voice soured, the effect of too much lemonade perhaps.

The General continued. “In the US ties to the UN are already weak. We do not require Geneva to overrule the local government if Earth’s security warrants immediate action. Currently we have absolute control over military deployments. You have the 456 to thank for that. Extraterrestrial military vigilance is at an all-time high and nothing in the 21st century _will_ ever be the same.” She turned away from the drill for a moment to meet his gaze. “The time constraint I quoted earlier is merely for paperwork to clear.”

Captain Jack’s lips were twisted into a grin but his eyes were cold. Above their heads black-tipped seagulls circled and screeched, calmly riding the ocean breeze on the lookout for scraps. The rats of the ocean, Jack would trust them with his lunch before he would trust this woman with Earth’s security but right now he had no choice.

Jack had come to the UNified Intelligence Taskforce with his tail between his legs. Six months after the destruction of Torchwood in Cardiff he had finally returned to Earth only to find it more changed than he was. The British government, still reeling from their own internal implosions, had wanted nothing to do with him. They denied that they were responsible for blowing up Torchwood in the first place and therefore felt no responsibility to help him rebuild. All of the Captain’s old assets had been frozen and the money he’d had long ago redistributed. The few scattered political allies he still maintained expressed their remorse at being unable to help. If only he had someone to back him, they had said, someone more established, someone they could trust, then they would throw their weight behind the Captain.

This was his reward for saving their children: complete alienation.

So he turned to UNIT. While he was the last standing reminder of Torchwood, UNIT was stronger than ever and though they had a shaky history together Jack was out of options. UNIT had the money, the connections, the resources, and the ammunition to help him rebuild so he offered his experience abroad and his expertise in the field if only they would, in turn, offer their support. They agreed on one condition: he was to work for their New York division for five years. He would never be promoted, or permitted a team, working strictly as a second opinion when they needed him and at the end of five years his memory would be erased but he would find everything he needed to create Torchwood.

Of course Jack wanted that in writing and he kept a copy of the contract somewhere he would find it later, if in fact UNIT thought they could get out of their end by simply making him forget he’d agreed to anything. When he was sure of this Jack said yes. Yes, he would enslave himself to UNIT. So they installed a tracking chip into his vortex manipulator and sent him to New York.

“They said I’d be working reconnaissance for you.” Jack stared out blankly at the toy soldiers running up and down the beach.

“…Yes.” The General nodded slowly, turning away from the drill. She sat stiffly across from the Captain. “In a manner of speaking. There’s a curiosity in the Northwest that’s caught our attention.”

Captain Jack abandoned his glass and its pink umbrella, tattered now from too much handling. He was eager to refocus his attention. “Go on. _”_

“A death in Montana, a young woman. The visual reports are conflicted but what caught our attention was the substance found in her blood stream. An unidentifiable substance, which of course leads us to believe it’s of an extraterrestrial nature.”

“And it killed her.” Jack was leaning on the edge of his wooden beach chair, the idea of a pandemic alien virus that needed his immediate attention, building to a sudden, furious crescendo in his imagination.

“No. An investigation has already been launched. Our scientists have concluded she died of coronary failure due to stresses on her system. They’ve also surmised the substance has no direct link to her death. However, I have been persuaded by my superiors to conduct a second investigation, just to be sure.”

Jack sat back, deflated, remembering the details of his contract. “Oh.”

“ _You_ came to UNIT.” General Erisa reminded him. “Should you think yourself unqualified for the task I’m sure your pact could be _renegotiated_.”

Jack frowned.

The message was clear: either he accepted the mission or UNIT would refuse him.

Jack’s relationship with UNIT in Cardiff was always a tense one. He had made it his own personal responsibility to know what new technology they had acquired while keeping Torchwood’s own developments strictly confidential. It was also possible that UNIT was clinging to an old grudge ever since he’d recommended the brilliant Martha Jones step down from New York’s division.

Martha Jones was too good for UNIT, but Jack didn’t hold himself to the same standards.

 “I’ll do it.”

 “Then let me introduce the private who will be in your charge.” With some silent command the General dismissed a guard who had stood just feet away during their exchange. Jack opened his mouth in protest but she cut him off. “She is to be your connection back to UNIT and your lifeblood for any further assistance you may need, military or otherwise. We will consider this arrangement of ours satisfied contingent on her safe return.”

 _Contingent on her safe return._ The insinuation stung and it caused something dark and hidden to swell up in the Captain. He kept his jaw screwed shut, but it took more effort than he expected. UNIT already thought he was an impulsive fuck up. He didn’t need to prove them right, but this was another insult among many. The single soldier under his command was still a sign of distrust. They weren’t giving him a team they were giving him a tail; someone new and fresh faced, someone they wouldn’t miss if Jack couldn’t figure out how to write up paperwork and accidentally stabbed them and killed them from ink poisoning.

 “Private Susan Boyd, Ma’am.”  Jack’s melancholy was cut short with the introduction of the new private, a young woman with a tight blond ponytail, a tight voice, and an even tighter face. She relaxed her salute at a nod from the General but turning to him she was curt. “Sir.”

Jack grimly noted the private was already a perfect miniature copy of General Erisa. There were rings under her eyes and her sharp cheeks and stern lips looked like canvas too tautly pulled over its frame. Unlike the General, however, she did not look handsome in her uniform. It was too big for her and the iconic UNIT cap sat on her skull at an awkward angle. What a waste, he’d thought. If you were going through the trouble of dressing up it ought to leave an impression. It did, he supposed, but not an impressive one.

“Private Boyd has already been debriefed,” the General said, “and a vehicle has been readied for you. It will take you to Newark Airport where a private jet will be waiting. There you will receive further details. Are there any final questions? ”

Jack raised his hand.

“….Captain.”

“Can I get one of those red hats?” He asked cheekily. “I’ve been asking for a while now and hey, since I figured I was working with you…” Jack shrugged his shoulders and grinned. It was clear allying with him was akin to nails on a chalkboard for the General. Of course the feeling was mutual but she had gotten in one too many low blows for Jack to simply hold his head high and walk away. His smile faded. “In case someone wants to know who screwed them. I could just point.”

There was finally a break in the woman’s armour, just a tiny chink where her scorn oozed out. Jack never once questioned why she hated him.

“You’re dismissed.” General Erisa stood. Susan Boyd saluted. A small troop of UNIT soldiers escorted them to an unmarked black van and no one made eye contact with him until the flight. Needless to say, he never got that hat.

Inside the jet Jack settled into the first leather seat nearest the cockpit. No one sat across from him so he glued himself to the window, only relaxing once the jet shuddered and jerked into the air. Whenever Jack flew he thought of the real Captain Jack Harkness who gave his life protecting his troops, protecting his country. Jack had given his life for someone once, but in an ironic twist of fate he’d been brought back so he could die over and over and over again; sometimes for heroic reasons, sometimes for no reason at all.

Tosh had once told him the real Jack would have been proud that he took his name and used it to save the world. But that was a lifetime ago. He couldn’t ask Tosh what she thought now. The organization he had dedicated several lifetimes to –his home, his team, his lover, and his self-respect— all of it was gone and the Captain Jack that believed in valour had disappeared along with it. He wasn’t left with much and felt like a stranger in his own skin.

Maybe it was time for a new name, a new identity. It would have been an easy transformation at the ends of the Andromeda galaxy where no one knew him. Drinking alone in some galactic bar he could be a David, or a Michael, or hell even Yaakov: trying on new names and identities until he found something he liked. Millions of light years from earth, the thought never crossed his mind.

His return wasn’t a signal of any new self-revelation only that Jack had identified with this kind of work for so long he didn’t know what else to do. He was desperate to find himself again, even willing to be belittled by UNIT just for the distant promise of recreating his home.

The Captain watched Newark as it shrunk beneath him. It was dark and the cities' shining lights merged together like clumps of stars in the sky; the surface of the earth a vast, twinkling cosmos.  Here, there was limitless opportunity to try over. He could start again and get it right in a place that _mattered_.

 

~~~~

Sam Winchester has peace in the mornings when he first wakes up. His eyelids crack open to let in the light that a pair of thick gaudy curtains is holding back. There are birds chirping outside that window, their soft, sweet calls a pleasant alarm.

His own motel room was a bit like a bird’s nest, with dated wood paneling still plastered to the walls and ugly brown shag carpeting. When he first took to the road again these places used to be suffocating. He would try to bribe his brother into spending more on a decent hotel room ‘just this once’ but Dean always refused. He’d grown accustomed to the seediness once again, just as he did as a kid. Now the cheap staleness of an outdated motel felt like home.

He smiled to himself, realizing how bizarre that sounded, and turning over he searched for his brother’s bed in order to complain about Dean’s snoring.

But Sam Winchester had checked into a single last night. There was no other bed and he had slept in complete silence.

Dean wasn’t there. Dean was dead. Dean had been dead for over a month and the sudden knowledge of what his conscience had been kindly hiding from him in those first few minutes fell across him now like hot lead –heavy and scarring.

These rooms don’t feel like home anymore, Sam remembered that now. Instead, it felt like living in someone else’s house, living someone else’s life. Across from his bed, sitting on the wooden desk against the wooden paneling, was dad’s journal. Slung over the chair back was Dean’s bag of rifles. Even the blood in his veins wasn’t his own. 

He had despised this lifestyle since he was a kid, and always longed to leave it behind for greener pastures. It was the one thing he wanted most: to live a normal life. When his father had gone missing Sam agreed to rejoin the family business of hunting down evil to help find him, but what he thought was a temporary break from his college aspirations had turned into his worst nightmares. Now John was dead, and so was Dean and they had both shackled Sam with their leftover shit.

Out of pure grief he was compelled to hunt down Lilith, the demon who had murdered his brother. Revenge was eating him up from the inside out and someday there would be nothing left except a hollow shell his brother had once endearingly called ‘Sammy’. Maybe then the ghosts of Dean and John would realize too-late they should have just let him go to Stanford like he wanted.

Until that day Sam had to hide the extent of his unraveling. There were demons to kill.

He threw off his comforter and quickly executed his morning ritual: washing, shaving, dressing, and avoiding the mirror when he could. He packed his things, made the bed, and cleared the room. After he checked out of the motel Sam threw two duffle bags into the back of the Impala. One was full of guns, salt, holy water, and iron; the other was divided into clothes and research materials. That plus his laptop was everything he owned.

When Sam was about to start the car his cellphone rang. It was an unlisted number and he’d been expecting the call.

“Yeah.”  Sam stared emotionlessly out of the windshield waiting for the voice on the other end.

“Highway 10 and Yates Creek Road.”

“I’m on my way.”

He hung up and tossed the cell in the passenger seat, turned over the Impala’s engines and headed towards the east side of a little town known as Wibaux.

Wibaux was near Montana’s eastern border with North Dakota. It had a population of 589 people, one bar and one diner and the diner had a single Yelp review that said “gets food out slow”. Heading west on Interstate 94 it was the first town you drove through and also a favorite stop for truckers driving from New York to Seattle and back.

It was a town not used to trouble. That’s why three separate reports of drivers purposefully crashing their semis after stopping at Wibaux caught Sam’s attention. One trucker that had survived reported choking on a cloud of smoke that he assumed was exhaust from his vehicle. Moments later he blacked out and couldn’t remember crashing into Wibaux’s general store.

That was all this hunter needed to suspect demon activity.

Highway 10 ran through town and Yates Creek road took you back to the highway. Before the intersection there was a rest stop, a nondescript red brick building with dirty bathrooms and vending machines. There were two cars parked in front and three semis in back. Sam drove past and pulled in to a dirt lot across the street. When he stopped in front of a lonely gray building covered in metal sheeting there was someone waiting for him. It was Ruby.

She opened the passenger side door and slid inside. His brother’s car creaked in protest, her leather jacket rubbing against the leather seats. The friction between two sets of patented dead skin made Sam’s stomach flip. She shivered and shut the door.

“Every time I get out of Hell I have to get used to how freaking cold it is topside.”

Sam sat in silence as she opened a bag of chips she’d snagged from the rest stop across the road. The bag popped in the space between them and made Sam grimace. He turned his head away and resented how easily the demon devoured those chips along with his personal space.

Ruby was a black mark on his soul. As a hunter it was his duty to kill off evil bent on destroying humanity and Ruby was a demon, she fit the bill. She claimed to remember what it was like to be a human but demons were talented liars. Sam wasn’t convinced she was any different from all the other hell spawn he’d sent back to the pit, but directly correlative to when his brother died, Sam had stopped caring.

Now they had something in common, the desire to kill Lilith. When Ruby offered to teach him how he didn’t hesitate. He’d broken his promise to Dean by working with her, and by using the demon blood Azazel had poisoned him with as a newborn, the same blood that ran through him now. Sam was convinced he knew better than his brother. Seeing Lilith beg for mercy as the last remaining Winchester slowly choked the life out of her would make it all worthwhile.

“So what’s the plan?” Sam asked.

 “Well, for one, you not fucking up this time.” Ruby crinkled up the empty bag and carelessly tossed it on the floor.

Sam turned to her in surprise and then scoffed. As much he was trying to learn from the demon he was, admittedly, a pretty shitty student. “Yeah. Okay.”

Ruby fixed him with a probing stare. He could almost feel the blackness behind her eyes trying to empty him out and fill him up like the vessel she was wearing. Eventually she relented and both demon and hunter stared out of the windshield, out into the distance, at nothing in particular.

“You were right,” she finally announced. “It’s a demon. He’s there now, across the street. We’ve got to make this quick. ”

“Another trucker?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “He’s got the unmarked trailer. Do it there, you’re less likely to be spotted.”

Sam reached behind him to grab his bag in the back seat. He dumped it in his lap and opened the car door. As he stepped out Ruby leaned over to look up at him.

“I’ll be right behind you.”

Sam paused, palms sweating on the cool edge of the Impala’s steel door. He nodded silently and looked away as he shut it and hoisting the duffle bag over one shoulder he crossed the street.

Behind the rest stop were the same three trucks Sam had originally passed. The first was blue and white with BENNET’S STORAGE AND CARTING painted on the side, the second was black with no trailer, and the third was unmarked. This was the truck Ruby referred him to.

Sam checked to see if the coast was clear before jogging over.

When he approached the vehicle he found that the doors were unlocked. Demons never thought they had much to fear, and in this case it might work to Sam’s advantage. Tossing the bag onto the passenger’s seat the hunter slid into the driver’s side, shutting the door beside him. Riffling through the bag he pulled out a can of spray paint and shook it. Like he’d done a dozen times before, Sam Winchester painted a devil’s trap on the ceiling.

The plan was to lay in wait for the demon to climb in so Sam could spring an exorcism on him while he was caught in the trap. But that plan was about to change since there was a trucker headed his way. He jammed the spray can back into his bag but there wasn’t enough time to jump out the driver’s side. He would have to hide.

Sam threw himself and his bag behind the seat, lying as flat and low as he could in the tight space. He heard the driver’s door open and held his breath as the trucker climbed in, shut the door and put the keys in the ignition. There was a small flask of holy water in his back pocket and Sam scrambled for it as the truck’s engines roared to life.

When the semi started to shift gears Sam sprung from his hiding spot and the demon howled in pain as the water hit its skin, attempting to cleanse the impure thing inside. Assuming the element of surprise to be on his side Sam grabbed the trucker’s head and held it back against the seat’s headrest. Holding the man in place, Sam tried to ignore the finger nails scratching at his arms and remember what he’d been taught.

The demon blood in his veins had given him peculiar mental abilities. At one time Sam was able to move objects with his mind but ever since Azazel’s death this power had become dormant. With Ruby’s help it had reawoken and Sam discovered he could actually exorcise demons strictly by using his mind. The sensation was akin to sticking his hand down a sewer drain. Pure nausea had inhibited his first attempts but he learned that by controlling his moral gag reflex he would eventually feel something and with a little more concentration he could grasp it, wrap his hands around it, and _pull_.

Sam heard the demon begin to gag; his mental exorcism was working. Unclenching his eyes the hunter saw smoke slowly pour of the trucker’s mouth and in another minute the demon would be back in hell where it belonged. Sam grinned, sure of his victory, when suddenly the trucker lurched forward and pushed his vehicle into gear.

He lost his grip on the demon’s head and stared in alarm as it pressed down on the gas pedal. The truck jerked forward and picked up momentum as it rolled out of the lot and immediatly down a very steep hill. Sam tried to escape by scrambling out the passenger side door but the truck flipped and he cracked his head against the dashboard as glass from the windshield shattered and cut him. Any mental connection he’d had with the demon was lost.

When the truck finally shuddered and stopped, crippled at the bototm of the hill, a pair of impossibly strong hands gripped his windpipe. The crash had dented the ceiling just above the driver’s seat, effectively breaking the seal. Sam gasped for air, kicking and clawing at the angry demon that hovered above him. It was the first time he had a good look at its eyes and to his surprise they weren’t black, they were green.

“I knew one of you hunters would show up sooner or later,” it snarled. “But I have bigger fish to fry right now.”

“ _Fuck you_ ,” Sam croaked. His efforts to escape from the thing’s preternatural strength were completely useless and he was starting to slip into a panic when the driver side door was suddenly ripped off. Both Sam and the demon attacking him turned to find Ruby, knife in hand, framed by the irregular outline of the partially crushed semi. If that knife stabbed a host possessed by a demon it would kill that demon and that has saved his ass more times than he cared to remember. This was the second time Sam remembered being very happy to see her.

The possessed trucker turned back to Sam and he could see his own panic had been transferred to it. _End of the line_ , Sam thought with a wicked smile. The trucker scowled, full green eyes suddenly clearing.

“I’m not done here.”

Ruby charged inside with her knife at the ready but just as she was about to drive it into the trucker’s back and through his gut, the demon poured out of its host’s mouth. The knife sliced deep into flesh and bone but the demon had escaped. Sam’s mouth gaped in silent horror as the human who had been released from a nightmare woke up simply to die.

Ruby cursed and pulled out the blade. The body fell next to the hunter with a heavy thud; the host’s eyes still open in fear. Sam wiped the man’s blood off of his face and tried to convince himself revenge was worth losing himself over.


	2. Bad Blood

When UNIT phoned ahead, the Dawson County Coroner’s office informed Captain Jack and Private Boyd they could stop by anytime to further their investigation of the young Montanan woman who had died. The office was open at all hours during the night and it was a small town.

But when the pair arrived they were forced to linger for a total of ten minutes in the entryway before even being acknowledged. A small, thin voice buzzed through on an intercom and asked what their business was. Captain Jack stated they were here to see the coroner. Told to wait a moment, they waited another ten, staring blankly at the set of doors shut in front of them. They remained closed no matter how many times Jack pressed the intercom and muttered “Torchwood” or “UNIT” or even “what are you doing this Friday?”

Through the bullet-proof glass, the police department that housed the medical examiner’s office opened up into a lobby. There were a pair of generic couches positioned under an American, state, and county flag. To the left of that, barrier posts zigzagged in front of the evidence and property division to keep long queues orderly. There was no one standing in line, no one in the lobby. To the right was the medical examiners’s office; its windows were also dark.

Finally the same tired voice crackled over the intercom again. “I’m sorry but the coroner is out on a call right now.”

Jack glared at the intercom hanging on the dim, gray wall. He interrogated himself to come up with a simple sentence that would convince the person on the other end to let them through. If only there was someone in front of him, Jack could work his charm but there was only an ugly, generic camera feeding their image into a grainy screen. If the Captain hadn’t thought of what to say in the last twenty minutes he couldn’t think of anything now.

“We’ll have him call you when he returns. It should be a few hours.”

Jack pressed the intercom button, determined not be dismissed so easily. “Well then, where--”

“--just a few hours.” There was a crackle, a click, and then silence.

Jack felt the heat of Susan’s gaze on the back of his neck. He let go of the intercom and curled his index finger into the palm of his wrist, squeezing his frustration into a tight ball. They marched back in silence to the black, unmarked SUV they had driven from the airport. He loitered in front of the tinted windows, staring into his own reflection and trying to think of what to do next.

Jack was surprised at his own indignant reaction. Waiting for two hours was a simple task, the assignment UNIT had given him even simpler, but it was the simplicity of it that cut him. There was nothing being asked of the Captain: no effort, no thought, no sacrifice—even though he was so desperate to redeem himself and he was running so fast from his own helplessness, that the simple bureaucratic inconvenience of waiting made him shrink. Suddenly the WWII coat he had worn for a decade in honor of the name he took felt loose about his shoulders.

Working with UNIT he was not his own man. The usual ease and swagger with which Captain Jack had traveled the universe was purposefully castrated under the watchful eye of Private Susan Boyd, the Private who watched Jack struggle with himself even now.

“Captain,” she said in perfect monotone. Standing to his right she was touching a familiar communications device wrapped about her ear. Jack spared the Private an impatient glance.

 “I’ve been listening to police chatter. There’s been a homicide at a state park and they’re calling in back up. I’m sure that’s where we’ll find the coroner as well.”

“And do what, help exhume the body?” The corners of Jack’s mouth twitched in irritation. He had already dumped her suggestion and went back to sorting through his own ideas.

 “Unless you would prefer to _wait_.”

Captain Jack paused, debating his next move as he watched Susan's face slowly twist in impatience. If the Private had as much aversion to sitting alone with him as he did to simply _sitting_ , then his choice had already been made. Jack nodded his approval, threw the car door open and sat inside. “Let’s go.”

It was a forty minute drive into the heart of Makoshika State Park where Private Boyd had first heard the police. Otherwise known as “the badlands” the park was 11,400 acres of exposed rock that rose up in ribbons of sediment like rings on an ancient tree, swallowing their tiny SUV as it cruised along the road, kicking up a cloud of dust. It plateaued out into a wide expanse of yellow grass dotted with dried shrubs, but it was still another ten minutes until they reached a semi-circle of police cars parked in front a ravine. An ambulance had parked farther ahead, its red and blue lights bathing everything in an unnatural pallor.

They joined the troop of vehicles and ground their feet into the gravel as they stepped out. They were here to find the county coroner and get permission to go back to the office in order to examine the body; a lot of beurocratic nonsense. If it had been Torchwood the young woman would already be in _their_ morgue.

Captain Jack and Private Boyd approached a group of four officers who gave them queer looks when he flashed a pair of credentials that said UNIT. Turning to each other with blank faces it was clear the name meant nothing to them. So much for being a big secret agency, Jack thought, if nobody realizes who you are.

“Unified Intelligence Taskforce,” Jack clarified. “ _Military Intelligence_.”

He was greeted with four angry faces but _that_ , at least, meant something to them.

“Your type comes quick,” one of the older officers observed. The others nodded in unison but stepped aside and pointed them to a path that led down a steep incline.

Captain Jack tucked the credentials away, silently pleased that something was starting to go his way. “Then let me know if I’m your type.” He smirked and pushed past them, leaning over the edge of the ravine.

The rock face dropped at a severe angle peppered with boulders that jutted out like steps. At the bottom there were more officers: sheriff’s deputies and a handful of coroner investigators. The path was narrow but it didn’t seem to matter, there was a wild spark of excitement in Jack’s eyes. He turned to his Private and smiled like he had some thrilling secret as a gust of wind sent the Captain’s greatcoat billowing out behind him.

They descended the ravine single file: Jack, his coat, and his Private.

The first thing he noticed was the smell; it hit him like a wall: the thick putrid stink of rotting eggs. When they finally reached the bottom The Captain got his first glimpse of the scene.

There was a young man lying face down in the dirt. His denim jacket and trousers were dirty, and torn, and one of his upturned palms was cut and bleeding. The most obvious source of trauma, however, was the knife wound in his back. Yellow evidence markers traced a long, erratic pattern of blood spatter up and down the ravine and ended by the pool around the victim’s head.

First responders were on standby with a gurney and a body bag while the coroner investigators continued to inspect the scene, and other officers scoured for further evidence.

Jack circled them, eyeing the scene carefully. Finally he squatted beside the coroner, near the victim’s head. He dipped a finger in the blood that doused the victim and the ground he lay on, rubbing it between his index finger and thumb. It was thick and viscous with a dark black-blue tint. It wasn’t blood at all. “Well. _That’s_ not human.” Suddenly his visit to Montana just got very interesting.

The coroner looked up from the scene and glanced warily between Captain Jack and Private Boyd. He stared at the officers they had first passed, mentally processing how they could have gotten down here. He seemed to conclude they were legitimate, however, and if he had any doubts about Jack in his WWII greatcoat or Susan in her military garb and bright red UNIT cap, he kept them to himself.

“And you are?”

“Human,” Jack said, and after a beat he grinned. “Captain Jack Harkness and this grouch in a beret is under my command. Don’t let her scare you, she never smiles.”

Concurring with Jack’s analysis, Susan frowned. The coroner, a shy man with bright red hair and thick black glasses, was mildly baffled by the boisterous introduction but he still shook the hand Jack extended, the one without the blood on its finger.

“Conner.”

“Conner the coroner?” Jack chuckled. “So Conner, can you tell me what happened here?”

“The victim appears to be a Joey Hayden," the cornor explained, "an eighteen year old from out of state. Our sheriff’s office received the call over an hour ago from a hiker who said they had discovered a body just off one of the trails. From what I can make of the scene he was stabbed in the back with a blade, something with a jagged edge; see here how the flesh is torn.” The coroner indicated the wound with a wave of his hand. “Running from his assailant but wounded he rolled from that ledge…down here, crawled to this spot and bled out.”

Jack nodded silently, staring at the droplets that led to the dead man. “Mmhmm.”

The coroner pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and studied Jack. “What did you mean, what you said before…?”

The Captain was pulled from his thoughts, his expression unreadable. He stood and nodded towards the victim and the black pool around his head. “Take a sample of that. I want an analysis, but keep it off the books, just between you and me.”

“Why?”

“Well,” Jack considered, “you want to see me again don’t you?” The Captain winked with all the subtlety of a charging bull.

Private Boyd had removed herself from the scene in order to avoid the smell and her face hardened as Jack stood and approached. “You didn’t ask to see the body back at the state office did you?” She chided.

Jack shook his head. “I think they have something here, something else that might interest UNIT.”

They turned back to watch the first responders finally encase the body in a black bag and take it away. Susan remained silent and Jack considered that a good omen.

The sight of the blood-that-wasn’t-blood had sent his gut churning, an old familiar feeling that he’d almost forgotten. His desire to discover the unknown came naturally to him, even if the reigns of leadership didn’t. He had made mistakes and had stumbled and fallen into the bottom of a ravine with only a Private loyal to UNIT at his side; this new case could be a chance to climb back out.

 

~~

 

Sam hadn’t slept since the incident in Wibaux and with Ruby’s demon blood racing through his veins he could have stayed up for days.

They were hunting another demon at three in the morning, through the arid fields of the badlands, hoping this was the green-eyed demon that had escaped them before. The plan was to corner it in an empty barn on the east side of Glendive but it had escaped before stepping into the devil’s trap. Sam was only able to follow it so far in the Impala until they were eventually forced to hunt the thing on foot. Luckily the demon appeared to have wounded itself along the way, leaving a trail of blood behind that was easy to follow.

Ruby was by his side as he moved through the mute, oppressive darkness. Her black hair blanketed her face and it was only the outline of the wicked silver blade in Ruby’s right hand that reminded him she was there at all. Sam was carrying nothing but the keys to his car and he felt invincible.

Hours earlier Ruby had placed a knife on the flat side of her arm, just underneath a major artery and said she wasn’t giving Sam a choice. “If you think that demon is just going to let you go, you’re wrong," she'd said. "He’ll be back for _both_ our asses and maybe even with Lilith in tow. But I’m not going to put you into hiding; you still have too much to learn. I need you ready.”

Sam shuddered when he saw his face reflected in the blade that grazed her skin.

She wanted him to drink her blood. Once a demon possessed a human their ‘demon blood’ had special properties. Sam found it not only focused his mental abilities, it supercharged them. For the longest time he had refused to do it because, frankly, the thought made him sick. He kept exorcising demons on his own thinking if he could just be a better student he wouldn’t have to take such desperate measures.

It worked for a little while until Sam met a demon he couldn’t stop, that Ruby couldn’t stop, and that murdered several innocent people and almost killed him. That’s when Sam realized there were very real limits to his own power. Nobody was going to come save him, he was on his own and Sam couldn’t afford to fuck up. So he drank her blood and sent that demon spawn back to hell. Now Ruby was asking him to do it again for this green-eyed monster and this time his aversion was nothing but a dull ache. It was as if a numbness had crept over him in his sleep; it stayed with him through the days and clouded his mind, clouded his judgment.

On the surface Sam was the same as he had been a month ago but since his brother’s death there’d been a tidal shift within him. A cold, dark current had risen from deep within, displacing all of his warmth, all of his kindness, everything that had once assured him he was human. But he wasn’t a monster _yet_. There was no way of knowing when he’d cross that threshold, but Sam clung to the desperate hope that he wasn’t a lost cause. He believed something or someone out there must be able to save him. Until then, he would keep fighting for a cause that was a little less than just.

Up ahead there was a snapping sound, like twigs breaking followed by a short, low moan. Sam caught Ruby’s gaze and they both proceeded to investigate. The blood spatter grew more frequent and Sam followed it to the edge of a ravine, below which he saw the prostrate body of the host they had been hunting, dragging itself across the ground.

Sam’s right foot hovered on the edge of the rock face, sending gravel tumbling down the sloped edge. He was testing the earth and preparing himself to climb to the bottom when Ruby tugged at his arm.

“Something’s wrong,” she hissed and the sound crackled across the dry fields like thunder.

Sam’s body was on fire, his head pounding with the sense of power and urgency that surged through his veins. It was urging him to exorcise the demon and he was blind to anything else. “Like what?”

“ _Just look at it_.”

Staring into the night Sam watched the demon struggle with some wound in its side, invisible to the hunter from where he stood. Then he realized what Ruby meant. Mortal wounds never stopped a demon before; it controlled its host like a puppet and didn’t feel the pain of the human’s body breaking down. Sam had pushed one out of a five story window only for it to come back to try and kill his family and him hours later.

“I think it’s a trap.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sam countered, staring down at the demon with single-minded determination. “I’m more than ready. You made sure of that.”

Ruby shook her head but she let go.

Sam walked along the edge until he found the easiest place to descend and the earth skidded out from beneath his feet as he slid down the side, Ruby following right behind him. It was a noisy descent; the demon had heard them coming and had gotten to its feet, trying to run in a pathetic sort of trot. Sam smiled when it eventually tripped and fell.

 “There’s nowhere to go.” He announced, approaching it quickly. The spots of black blood multiplied into small pools about his feet as he drew nearer.

The demon turned to look back at him and Sam caught his first good look at the host. It was a young kid, maybe in his early twenties with curly hair and a white t-shirt, torn and turned black. The kid’s chest heaved and Sam saw the same blood that stained his shirt coagulated around the edges of his dry, cracked lips. They parted in an attempt to speak.

“… _help_.”

Sam halted in his tracks, not sure he had heard it right. He noticed the kid was shaking and all the color had drained from his face.

“Help me. I’m sick _. I’m on fire_.”

Sam hesitated.

“It’s the human,” Ruby sang out, just behind him now. “The demon’s just using him.”

If a human is lucky it won’t remember being possessed. When a demon takes over it sends the human’s mind into a deep sleep so when it leaves they feel as if they’ve awoken from some nightmare. But sometimes the demon pulls back and the human wakes while still possessed. It’s a cruel trick meant to throw off hunters, since it’s a lot harder to kill the thing inside when someone’s panic-stricken eyes are staring you down like _you’re_ the devil.

“Is there someone else there? I need help, please. I, I think I’m bleeding. Oh god…it’s everywhere!”

Sam stood and stared, his fists clenched against the pleas that broke out into quiet sobs. Ruby stood beside him like a void that tugged at his heart. The knife in her hand was dull in the starlight but her voice was sharp.

“Do it.”

Sam nodded, stretched out his hand, focused his mind and began to pull.

Ruby’s blood in his veins did the trick, pulling out the demon was easier this time. Within a matter of seconds a thick cloud of smoke started to pour from the possessed man’s nose and mouth. This was the demon’s natural form. Sam watched his work with satisfaction until a sharp, cold pain slapped him across the face. The surprise cut his mental connection allowing the demon to jerk back inside of its host.

Sam shook his head and tried again but the pain came back, even stronger this time. He was forced to give up, wincing as his skull throbbed. Blood trickled from his nose, down his lips, and Sam wiped it from his face and stared at it, puzzled.

He felt Ruby’s fingers about his arm again like a vice. She was staring straight ahead. “ _What the fuck_.”

Sam followed her gaze to see the demon roll over and vomit something thick, dark, and black. The trail they had been following wasn’t blood after all but some kind of unnatural regurgitation that stank of sulfur. It sounded like a dying dog as its cries of pain were cut off by the black curdled milk that spewed from its mouth. The hunter stared in horror as the kid convulsed, sobbed, and continued to heave. Sam shifted from his right leg and then to his left, debating whether to help or to run.

“Kill it,” Ruby suddenly hissed in his ears. “Kill it for _fuck’s_ sake.”

Sam stared at her for several seconds before registering what she’d said. “I can’t,” he admitted. “I can’t get a connection, even _with_ your help. It’s like something else is…in there, something I don’t have control over.”

“Something _else_?”

Sam nodded. “I think it’s dying.”

The darkness that ran in his veins was whispering to him. On some elemental level it knew the human was being purged of demon blood but the idea of a liquefied demon being pushed out of this kid like bad Chinese food made Sam’s knees grow weak. Apparently it just pissed Ruby off.

“You don’t know _what_ the hell it’s doing!” She spat back and raising her knife up to the level of her chest she slowly walked towards the host. The blade glinted across her cold steely face as her pace picked up speed.

When the kid realized she was coming after him, he cried out and tried to crawl away but Ruby didn’t hesitate. She straddled him, her foot imprinted in the black putrid substance, and despite his crying and pleading she drove her knife deep into his back.

There was a flash of light from his eyes and mouth, even the blackness that had been pouring out of him lit up, a crackling electric current racing across its surface. Finally he went still and slumped to the ground, dead. There was a moment of complete stillness until Ruby ripped the knife out again. The awful sound of flesh and muscle being broken tore something in Sam. He realized it was guilt. He had stood by and done nothing.

Ruby came back to Sam, displaying the knife proudly. “That was a _mercy_ killing.”

Sam’s lip curled into a sneer wondering for whom exactly the mercy was for. Still, he said nothing and they both stood in silence staring at the man painted in black.

When Ruby spoke again she was tired. “We should get out of here.”

Though he’d been pumped full of demon blood for this exorcism Sam felt the same exhaustion overtake him. They had not found the green-eyed demon but what they did find would haunt Sam for days to come. He nodded in agreement and they made their way back up the hill towards the Impala. When they were in the relative safety of his vehicle they sat, not wanting to think or talk about what they saw and welcoming the numbness of the dark. But eventually the sun started to rise and with it came a slow inexplicable sense of fear in the pit of Sam’s stomach. He turned over the Impala’s engines and headed west as fast as he could.

 It wasn’t until he was shut up in his motel room with the blinds shuttered that Sam thought to call the police, posing as a hiker on an early morning jog.


	3. Another Hit and Run

Jack sat on the edge of his hotel bed waiting for his mobile to ring. It was a nondescript room with an ugly floral patterned duvet and two generic post-card paintings of the Montanan countryside framed and placed in a spot of reverence over his formica headboard. Jack twisted the leather-encased manipulator about his wrist as he waited. This room was a prison cell and his manipulator, once a symbol of freedom, had become a shackle.

UNIT could track everywhere he went and they were already trying to control everything he did. It was a rotten deal they had struck with him –five years of indentured servitude ending with a nice memory wipe to say goodbye—but Jack had been thinking of a way to get out of this since the beginning. All he needed from UNIT was their name. If his remaining political allies mistook this temporary alliance as trust between Torchwood and UNIT (instead of the dubious contract it was), then they would be more willing to support him. All Jack needed was one person in power to grant him money, resources, and amnesty from any further interventions by the government and he would have Torchwood back. Once he had that, to hell with this deal.

In the meantime Jack had to play nice.

He didn’t sleep very well on these cheap mattresses, though to be fair he wasn’t sleeping very well at all. Jack would lie directly on top of the duvet and if he needed covers, used his coat. There was nothing for the maids to clean or straighten the next morning. He had not brought any valuables with him, any clothes or personal possessions, so the room appeared untouched, unoccupied. Jack was waiting for something to change. He didn’t know what it was but when it happened he would be ready.

Finally his phone rang, it was General Erisa and Jack stood up to answer it.

“Captain,” she began.

“General.”

“I heard you’ve discovered something.”

Jack stood beside the window and peeked outside. He had a perfectly picturesque view of a beautiful Montanan parking lot and Susan was down below, smoking. Funny, he'd thought her too uptight, too attached to the job to do something as reckless as smoke. “We found something in the badlands,” he explained. “At first glance it appeared to be a homicide but the residue we observed at the scene suggested…well, I’m not sure what but it wasn’t pretty.”

The General was tight-lipped. “I see.”

“And it warrants further investigation,” Jack pressed. “I could lead a team to investigate, hand-pick them myself and set up base here. “ _Anything,_ he thought, _to get away from you_.

“Captain…” The General‘s voice was admonishing, warning him not to continue. “You are acting as a liaison only. Therefore you should not continue to waste time and energy on something UNIT has not directed you to pursue.”

Jack paused. He was _supposed_ to be following orders, doing what he was told. He had to be agreeable so UNIT would continue to work with him and maybe pursuing this case wasn’t the best way to do that, but the image of that kid lying face-down in a pool of black vomit still haunted him. “Whatever you think of my intentions, I’m _telling you_ there’s something else going on here.”

“We may disagree on the way to proceed Captain but do not mistake _our_ intentions either. Private Boyd has already advised me to launch a separate investigation which I will consider but hear me very clearly when I say this: _it will not include you_. Now I _advise_ you to follow your orders and proceed to the coroner’s office where you will report to me in in 01300 hours with no more delays, and no further sidetracking. Is this understood?”

Playing nice might secure the future of Torchwood, but if he ignored this case it would be rebuilt on shaky ground. “Yes,” he lied.

Convinced, the General dismissed him and hung up.

When Jack looked out the window again Susan was gone but she had left a cigarette butt in her wake, smoldering and dying on the pavement. She was taking the elevator to the fifth floor and any minute she would knock on his door and remind him, as the General had done, of his duty to visit the coroner but Susan was an extension of the General and they were herding him, like a sheep, in some blind direction.

He wanted to pick up the results he had asked the coroner to run but didn’t want Susan knowing of it. If he was quick enough she might not sound an alarm, and since he was going where he had been ordered to, Jack was sure no one would be the wiser.

He sprang across the room and threw on his greatcoat, slipping his mobile into the pocket and cracked open the door. There was no sign of Susan yet, so the Captain strode across the hotel’s hallway and descended the stairwell. Once outside, he got into the unmarked SUV and drove to the medical examiner’s office.

This time there was no waiting. They ushered him in with polite smiles and showed him to the office at the right where the Captain met with the same man he’d encountered at the crime scene the night before: Conner the coroner.

“Ah, you again.” Conner smiled up at the Captain.

“Did you miss me?” Jack asked, his natural charm dialed to 11.

“I _was_ wondering when you’d return,” he admitted, surreptitiously glancing behind the Captain. “Alone this time?”

“Just you and me.” Jack announced and then he winked. “Since we have unfinished business.”

Conner was a thin man, his shirt was too big for him and so were his pants. His belt, cinched at the waist, was like a rope around a monk’s abbot. His hair was also too long and his glasses consumed his face. Jack could never make out his expression but right now he could see Connor thoughtfully working his jaw.

 “…The results.” Connor glided to the computer opposite his desk. “I had the sample forwarded overnight to a friend who owed me a favor.”

“After this, I might owe you one.”

The coroner was silent, his erratic mouse clicking suddenly loud in Jack’s ears. “Here it is,” he finally announced, clicking _print_.

Jack took the print out, skimming the analysis. Whatever they found, it wasn't anything Jack was familiar with.

“That’s not all,” said Conner, spinning around in his chair. He pulled something else the printer had spat out and handed it to Jack. “Your organization came here for another case. The woman who died a month ago, dead and found in a field, no one knew why, including me. Her blood samples also churned out some weird results.”

“Wait, hang on.” Jack studied the analyses closer. They were identical except for the case numbers at the top. “You’re telling me that the sample you took last night and the woman we were _supposed_ to see had the exact same substance in them?”

“Yes.”

 _This was it_ , Jack mused. He _had_ been right all along, there was something else at work here and this was his proof. Now UNIT would have to listen to him, put him in charge so he could figure this out and set everything right. Maybe they’d even forget their stupid contract. Hope swelled in the Captain’s chest and for the first time he was able to see a way out of this pit instead of running around it in circles.

“I could kiss you,” Jack laughed breathily.

“That’s an odd reaction to blood work.”

The Captain’s cheeky grin creased his face as he folded up the analyses and placed them in his pocket. “Something about offices,” he mused. “In my line of work, they’re kind of exotic.”

“Well this one’s attached to a morgue. I’ve got to get out sometimes or else I’ll run away screaming.” The coroner laughed and then cleared his throat. “Don’t suppose you’d like to join me?”

No longer looking at the computer screen the coroner had folded his glasses, his hair had been brushed aside, and Jack could finally see the expectations his reckless flirting had built.

“In running away?” He joked, trying to hastily get out of the situation he had created.

“In getting out,” Connor corrected, fidgeting awkwardly.

There had been a time when Captain Jack Harkness would have been eager to reciprocate the attention, but now the effect of his easy charm caused his chest to tighten. The idea of sharing anything more than a few laughs with someone made his heart ache and he couldn’t place why but jesting about offices made it even worse.

Jack reached out to touch Connor’s shoulder; it took a moment to find his bone and flesh under that billowing white shirt. “If I knew how to get out, I would.” Jack’s voice was soft and apologetic. He tried to smile but it just looked like a grimace. “But I don’t.”

Connor suspected they were talking about two different things, but still knew he was being rejected. He allowed Jack his mystery and didn’t feel the need to dissect it.

“I’m sorry.”  Jack said as he let go. Then he left the office, and couldn’t bear to look back.

On the ride back to the hotel he phoned the General.

“Your report, Captain?”

“Listen, there’s something you should see,” he said. “The substance in the original case, it’s cropped up again. I know you said it didn’t cause the last death but this is more coincidence than I like.”

“The discussion we had earlier, about not wasting time—“

“Yeah,” Jack cut in with a wry smile. “Sorry.”

“….You’re certain then, of this second occurrence?”

“Positive,” Jack confirmed.  “And I have the proof for it too.”

The Captain pulled into the hotel parking lot only to find it decorated with police cars. He slowed down to see what was going on.

“I’ll need to confer with Private Boyd on this matter,” the General continued.

Jack sat in the SUV watching the police officers congealed at the front of the building. “My word isn’t enough?” He said dryly.

“Private Boyd is there to _confirm_ your word. I brought her to the Northwest as someone I could trust completely. She has a bright mind and quick reflexes. As a UNIT soldier she is the perfect example: loyal to a fault.” The General hung up, and with that praise ringing in his ear the Captain tried ringing Susan but she didn’t answer. It went straight to voicemail.

Jack got out of his vehicle and entered the hotel.  When he passed the officers by the entrance, Jack thought he recognized some of their sour faces from the badlands, but if the officers also recognized him they turned away.

Inside, he approached the concierge behind the desk and asked what happened. “I don’t know,” the woman said.  “There was some sort of shoot out on the fifth floor and two people rode out in an ambulance.”

The Captain grimaced. Susan’s room was on the fifth floor, and so was his. Muttering his thanks Jack rushed up the stairwell, the sound of his steps, blood, and breath pounding together in an erratic cacophony. At the fifth floor he entered the hallway to discover another group of officers standing in front of his open door, yellow tape stretched across it.

He started to run towards the scene but then hesitated, afraid of what he would find.

“Sir!” said a young female officer. “You can’t go in there.”

"But this is my room," Jack protested.

She grabbed at the Captain’s arm but failed to pull him away. He stood in the frame of the door and froze: there, at the foot of his bed and covered by that ugly floral duvet, was a body.

“I understand but this is a crime scene; I’ll need you to step back.”

Ignoring the warning, Jack ducked under the tape and lifted up the sheet to find a man dressed as one of the hotel’s staff. Jack shuddered with sudden, obvious relief, passively allowing himself to be escorted outside of the room again by the young officer. He turned to her once they were in the hallway again, one thing on his mind.

 “Susan Boyd. Private Boyd. She was under my care, the room directly across from mine. Was she involved in this? _Was she injured_?”

The officer frowned, annoyed at the Captain’s interruption but that annoyance quickly turned to pity. “There _was_ a female soldier,” she confirmed. “She was taken to the hospital in critical condition along with another man.”

Jack ran back to the SUV and raced out of the lot. Everything had gone mute. Once again his world had exploded, and the blast had rendered him deaf. The only thing he heard was a sharp buzzing in his ear that whispered _contingent on her safe return_.

 

~~~~

Ruby had been gone for a couple of days but Sam wasn’t worried, worried would imply that he cared. He cared about her like he cared about the watch about his wrist: he checked to make sure it was working, and it was still there like he expected. He called Ruby, she answered, and that was it, but he didn’t worry because you don’t worry about demons. He had had _plenty_ of demon problems but Ruby wasn’t one of them.  

Currently, he was absorbed in tracking down that green-eyed demon. He’d tried to research the phenomena of green eyes but couldn’t find anything concrete. Honestly there was very little information on the color of demon’s eyes and its power and place in hell. Everything Sam knew so far was from pure experience.

There were your black-eyed demons, your more common, run-of-the-mill hellspawn, as prevalant as cockroaches and just as tough to kill. Next step up the ladder were the red eyed demons; these were the ones that showed up to sell souls. Then there was the odd colors, like Azazel, the yellow-eyed demon that his dad had spent the better part of his life hunting. Yellow-eyed demons and white-eyed demons were the nastiest of the bunch. Not even Ruby’s knife worked on these monsters and that’s why he was changing his body into a demon-killing machine.

That’s also why he noticed Ruby was absent, he might need her around. Sam could obtain demon blood from something other than her but the prospect of drinking it was disgusting enough, the idea of farming it for that purpose wasn’t _yet_ something he was willing to do.

In the meantime, Sam was just trying to _find_ the damn thing. He went back over the case that had brought the demon to his attention: the semi-trucks that had driven off of the highway.

The semis the demon had been targeting were, surprisingly, all owned by the same parent company Osato, a pharmaceutical conglomerate. Online Sam discovered that Osato had also partnered with another company under the name of MALI. It was a fake name, and after some more research Sam discovered MALI was a cover name for The Unified Intelligence Taskforce, a government organization focused on military defense. What kind of military defense and for exactly what purpose, was strictly classified, and why a demon would care was a complete mystery.

So Sam dug deeper on UNIT. He couldn’t get any direct information on them; it was too encrypted, but luckily for every unknown thing that exists, the internet is flooded with theories.  He stumbled across detailed extraterrestrial sightings scattered with alien fanatics (and had to try very hard not to think of them as “those people”) but for every major alien sighting someone always made a connection back to UNIT.

According to one forum, _paranoidbastard76_  said UNIT was responsible for signaling the firing of thousands of anti-aircraft rounds at unidentified aerial objects in 1942 in Los Angeles, California and then offered several photos (doctored, Sam thought) of officers in red berets, at the infamous crash in Roswell, New Mexico. Then _ivbeenprobed!_ posted it was UNIT Jimmy Carter called on to report a UFO sighting.

These internet crazies insisted that the Unified Intelligence Taskforce was either responsible for saving the earth, or for creating hoaxes to suck up more of the taxpayer’s dollars. But this agency, unlike the aliens they may be tracking, definitely existed.

Of course none of this research surmounted to anything until last night.

Glendive was one of the few cities in the Northwest that broadcasted their police chatter online. After calling the sheriff’s office to inform them of the body Ruby and him had left, Sam listened with anxious ears at what followed. There was never an APB put out on him with a list of physical characteristics to look for, instead Sam found the officers describing a man and woman in uniform claiming to be there for military intelligence purposes. It wasn’t until they remarked on the iconic red beret, however, that Sam made the connection: UNIT was here. 

It could be a coincidence that a government agency theorized by some to be involved in "saving the Earth from extraterrestrial threats" just happend to show up after a demon purposefully destroyed three trucks associated with, but Sam doubted it. That demon and this organziation was connected, somehow. Sam planned on finding out how, and since green-eyes was proving difficult to track down he decided to focus on UNIT.

Luckily, this was still a small town; it wasn’t used to much excitement, so when Sam found that a private charter had flown into the Glendive airport two days ago he thought that might be the perfect place to start. He completed his research by checking rental car records and discovered a black SUV had been rented by a Captain Jack Harkness (which was a stupid alias for some one in a top-secret organization, Sam thought) and they were currently staying in a generic hotel to the east of the airport.

At 2 o’clock in the afternoon Sam Winchester found a young female officer in a military uniform and UNIT’s red cap standing outside the Days Inn hotel, smoking. Fifteen minutes later she went back inside and shortly afterwards a man in a long, dark greatcoat headed towards the unmarked vehicle and pulled out of the lot shortly afterwards.

Sam had come prepared, dressed in a basic set of khakis and a white polo shirt he blended in with the hotel’s staff. He snuck in through the back entrance and after grabbing a mop, bucket, and a set of master keys, he loitered in the lobby until the woman behind the concierge desk stepped out. With access to their computer, Sam pulled up the guestbook and sure enough, there on the fifth floor was a Captain Jack Harkness: bingo.

Ditching the mop, Sam made his way to the fifth floor and using the set of master keys he nabbed, he opened room 505 and stepped inside. It was a horribly ordinary room for an agent, but it might as well have been The Plaza in comparison to Sam’s usual stint. There were no suitcases, boxes, or any kind of personal apparel. Sam checked the drawers and found they were empty as well. He was worried he had broken into the wrong room until he noticed a generic hotel bible sitting on the nightstand. He flipped through it idly and found in Genesis where it said ‘God created man’ some one had scratched a part out to write ‘and Jack thought it was good.’

Closing the bible Sam ran a hand through his hair, not sure what he had expected to find: a misplaced note that conveniently explained everything? a map marked 'green-eyed' demon is here? Sam sighed, yeah right. If his instinct was right then it may take weeks for the demon to resurface. In the meantime he would have to stick close to UNIT, which may mean an unpleasant few weeks of cleaning toilets. Then again maybe it would only take a few minutes because he suddenly heard the door unlocking. Cursing his streak of bad luck, Sam jumped into the bathroom and closed the door part way, reaching for Ruby’s knife tucked into the back of his khaki pants. He peered through the open crack and held his breath.

“Captain?”

It was the soldier Sam had seen earlier. She was still wearing the same red beret. Glancing about the room curiously she turned towards the bathroom. “We’re due at the coroner’s office in half an hour.”

Sam shrunk against the wall and held his breath as she stepped inside, pushing the door open farther and farther. It was inches away from his face, any closer and she was bound to discover where he was hiding. Sam mentally berated himself for leaving that mop downstairs. At least playing a stupid janitor was less likely to get him shot than hiding in the corner with a weapon. Luckily, he was saved by yet another knock on the front door. The soldier paused, glancing around to determine her Captain was not there and turned back. Sam nearly collapsed with relief.

“Yes?”

From Sam’s hiding place, he heard the muffled reply. “There’s a man waiting for you downstairs, he sent me to look for you.”

“What man?” The soldier asked, suspiciously.

“A Captain,” the voice replied. “He said you might be poking about his room.”

“That cheeky bugger…”

Sam wasn’t sure what happened next, all he remembers was the door opening, a shout, a scream, and a gunshot. Bursting from his niche in the loo Sam found another guy dressed like him sprawled out on the floor and the soldier standing over him with a gun pointed at his face. The man on the floor was growling in pain and Sam saw that his eyes were bright green: the demon had followed them here like Sam predicted. But then this hunter saw what was causing the demon so much pain. Salt bullets. _She had salt bullets_ and only hunters knew that trick.

Of couse by then Sam was standing in the bathroom door with a knife in his hand thinking he was going to save the soldier in the red beret. It was not one of his shining moments because the soldier took one look at him and fired. Sam had the breath knocked out of him as the salt peppered his side, causing him dropping the knife. Salt wasn’t going to kill him but it sure hurt like a bitch.

The green-eyed demon took advantage of the situation, suddenly lifting a chest of drawers and chucking them across the room at the soldier who was struck on the side of the head, crumpling to the ground. It went after her and while the hunter was scrambling for the knife he heard a sickening _crunch_.

Shooting to his feet Sam lunged after the demon, desperate to test his theory of how strong this thing really was by plunging the knife into its gut, but the demon caught his hand and twisted it, making him drop it once more. The demon wrapped his fingers around Sam’s throat and lifted him off the ground. 

The Winchester brother dangled in the demon's grip, trying to pry the host's fingers lose. “Looks like I'm not the only one...interested in killing you.” Sam observed.

“These people?” it chuckled. “It’s not just a gaggle of hunters here. Hunters are scattered, disorganized and besides you they’re pretty much all _dead_. No this is humanity at its best, practical and thoughtful monsters. For once you should agree that I’m not the bad guy.”

Sam laughed but it just came out as gargle. “ _…doesn’t look like that from here._ ” He reached out and grabbed its face and even though he was dangling in the air he summoned what strength he had left to exorcise it. The demon began to choke and Sam tried to work it out of its host. He thought he was going to win this one until it threw him violently into a wall. Those ugly green eyes mocked him before he finally passed out.

When Sam woke up he had been cleaned and stitched up. There were a myriad of cuts and bruises on his face and the wound in his side had required a few stitches, but otherwise he was alive. He was hooked up to an IV drip and a cardiac monitor that sat beeping consistently to his right, five leads from the machine sitting coldly on his chest.

They’d put him in some isolated part of the hospital and cleared this room out just to lock him up. Outside he could see, through a small window in the door, an officer standing guard. He had been told earlier that he was being charged with the murder of the hotel attendant. One hour later the officer who stood guard outside his room entered and told him the woman in uniform hadn’t made it. Now the charges against him had risen from one, to two counts of first degree murder.


	4. Killer on the Loose

Jack had gotten there too late.

When he arrived at the Dawson County Hospital Susan had already been declared dead ten minutes prior. He was told her rib cage had partially collapsed, causing massive internal injuries and, ultimately, internal bleeding that they couldn’t stop. All of this and still no one could tell him exactly what had happened. He was given condolences and a nurse led him to Susan who was nothing but a ghosted outline under a thin white sheet.

Captain Jack stood for several long minutes studying the profile of her face as the bridge of her nose pushed the sheet up and then fell back into the sockets of her eyes and curled over the brow of her forehead. Jack realized he’d been walking the edge of a precipice for some time but only now, with Susan’s death, did he feel a cold sharp wind measuring the yawning chasm beneath him. He debated what he should do next.

The General had been pleased with the promise of his discovery, but Jack wasn’t naive enough to believe that meant anything. UNIT disliked him, General Erisa in particular, and no charming smile, dashing heroics, or brilliance on his behalf was going to make them overlook the facts: he’d abandoned his post, and now his Private, the _one_ person they had entrusted him with was dead. The Captain’s track record for keeping people alive was _already_ poor so If UNIT was looking for an excuse to get out of their end of the contract, just as he had been looking to get out of his, then they had found a good one. Because Jack couldn’t explain the random violence that had killed Susan and he was fairly sure ‘whoops’ wasn’t going to cut it with the head of New York’s division.

UNIT had been his _last_ hope. If he failed this time there would be no Torchwood.

“Can’t save a good woman but they’ve sure spared no expense to patch the villain up fine.”

The Captain turned to find a gray-faced officer standing solemnly in the doorway.

The man nodded to Susan. “Doesn’t seem right.”

Jack was still staring into the darkness of the cavern beneath his feet, so used to standing on its edge he was numb to the fear. “What doesn’t seem right?”

“That she’s down here dead, and he’s up there alive.”

Jack shut his eyes and when he opened them again he looked at the officer as if really seeing him for the first time. “…the man who killed her?”

The officer nodded and Jack nodded with him in some unspoken pact.

“Take me there.”

The officer turned and left, and Jack began to follow when he felt a sharp tug on his coat. It had gotten snagged on the metal operating table just below Susan’s hand. The image of Susan dictating him to stay even from beyond the grave loomed up in Jack’s mind and somehow she seemed more real to him then, as a sheet-covered cadaver, then she’d ever been as a Private of UNIT. Horrified, Jack pulled himself free and bolted from the room.

The officer led him up three flights of stairs to an empty floor. The hospital had scheduled this section for reconstruction later that year and was starting to drape it in sheets of plastic to contain the spread of dust. This is were they had decided to contain the prisoner as he recovered.

They stopped in front of a white wash door with a pale light coming out from under it.

The officer reached for a ring of keys about his waist. “Can give you some time alone if that’s what you’d like,” he said, not looking at Jack. “None of my business is it?”

Jack narrowed his eyes, wary of what the officer was implying. “…sure.”

His stomach knotted wondering if this was a normal breach of power in this part of the northwest, where frustrated officers would bring their own sense of justice to whatever soul looked guilty enough. It disgusted him, but then again this man had looked at Jack and assumed the same moral perversion. With a thousand deaths on his back and on his hands what sort of monster must Jack look like?

“Just give us a knock when you’re done.”

The light that had shone out from under the door seemed to shrink away from him his presence once the Captain stepped inside. When the door shut behind him with a loud, heavy, _thud_ , Jack was briefly unsure they weren't locking him up as well.

It was an ordinary hospital room –gray floor, white walls—but with none of the extra frills. The chairs, curtains, and tables had all been put into storage. There was no window, just an open hole taped over with plastic (apart of the ongoing construction Jack assumed). There was only a cardiac monitor, and an IV drip next to a defibrillation machine set up to nurse the man who was handcuffed to a standard-grade hospital bed.

Jack approached slowly, appraising the man accused of killing Susan. He was young but not small, over six feet tall with broad shoulders and thick hands. He was in dire need of a haircut but it was his eyes that made him look wild, dangerous. Handcuffed to the rails of the hospital bed, he was like some kind of vicious animal and when Jack stood in front of him he could see the fear dancing behind that stone-cold face. There was no doubt in Jack's mind that this kid was capable of murder.

“I just want some answers.”Jack said warily. He leaned against the opposite wall, putting some distance between them.

The prisoner didn't relax. Jack could see him weighing all of his options, computing a  way to get out of the bed and slit his throat.

“I’m Captain Jack Harkness,” he began, dry and hollow. Jack's introductions were usually boisterous and flirtatious but this was the exception. “Who are you?”

“ _I’m innocent,"_ was the convicted response.

The Captain laughed but it died quickly, swallowed by the empty room.

“I know how it sounds,” the prisoner said, raising his arms as far as the cuffs would allow. “And I’m not going to say I don’t exactly deserve these, but I didn’t kill your friend. She wasn’t even supposed to be there.”

“Neither were you,” Jack snapped.

“I was trying to _warn_ you.”

 _Now_ they were getting somewhere. Jack narrowed his eyes and took a cautious step forward. “….warn me of what?”

 _"Like you don’t already know._ ‘Military intelligence,’” the prisoner scoffed, growing increasingly frustrated. “And all this time you _knew_ they were out there while the rest of us had to fend for ourselves.” In a fit of anger the kid yanked at his restraints, his muscles bulging, the veins under his skin emerging.

Jack stepped back again, wary of the man chained to the bed but still perversely interested in the mystery unfolding before him. But Jack was careful not to treat him like a sideshow freak, if there was any chance of getting information he had to at least pretend he believed him. “You never said your name,” Jack said gently, trying to gain some kind of ground to work from.

The kid looked at him suspiciously, calculating whether or not he should answer. Finally his tightly coiled shoulders relaxed, just an inch. “….Sam. Winchester.”

“Okay Sam Winchester, whatever it is you think that I know, pretend I don’t.”

Sam’s nostrils flared as he laughed.

“I’m serious,” Jack insisted, taking another step forward. “ _What_ were you were trying to warn me about?”

He waited for Sam to translate what he'd seen into words. Jack remembered the thousands of people before this kid, trying find the words for the strange things they’d seen-'alien', 'monster', 'el diablo'- Jack had heard it all before. 

“I was going to warn you about the _green-eyed_ demon. I think he's targeting you, or UNIT more specifically.”

 Jack didn't even blink, but he was intrigued that  this kid knew about UNIT. “Describe it to me," he said. "By demon you mean what: a little red thing with a pointed tail, a twenty foot monster with horns? Cause I've seen both and on their home planets they go by different names, so you're gonna have to help narrow it down for me, Sam.” Jack couldn't help the arrogant little grin that slipped in at the end. It was true though, 'demon' meant nothing to him. Captain Jack Harkness had fought Abaddon, wrestled with faeries. Hell, even he himself had been called the devil more than once.

“It's nothing like that.” Sam peered at the Captain long and hard, unsure if Jack was mocking him or not. “They possess _humans_ , it could _look like_ anybody.”

 Jack thought about that possibility, unhappy with the prospect. “Then maybe it’s you," he suggested a cocky shrug "… _maybe it’s me_?” Jack was suddenly in his element, searching for something new and exciting. He briefly forgot the seriousness of the situation. He briefly forgot about Susan.

 “No,” Sam scoffed venomously. “ _You’re_ just an ass.”

Jack's smirked flickered.

“I guess this is a waste of time for both us,” Sam concluded. “Because for a second there I _thought_ you could help me.” Laughing bitterly he shook his head, dirty hair clinging to his forehead. “But that’s not in your line of work is it?”

Jack narrowed his eyes, watching this kid carefully. ”You’d be surprised.”

Sam's face twisted into something nasty and spiteful. “I don’t think I would.”

There was a long pause, broken only by the flickering of lights. Jack glanced up at the ceiling as the door behind him was unlocked. The officer who had chaperoned Jack stepped back inside.

“I’m not done yet,” Jack barked, staring down his nose at Sam, whose eyes had suddenly dilated.

“Yes you are.”

Jack turned around to face the guard. There was a gun in his hands, and something wrong with his eyes, but before Jack could figure out why the were glowing green the officer raised the gun and shot him, once in the chest, and once in the head. Captain Jack was dead before he hit the floor.

~~~

There was an awkward point in Torchwood’s history where Jack was forced to bring back Suzie, a former employee who had gone rogue and shot herself when Torchwood discovered she was behind a string of murders. They’d used an alien device quirkily nicknamed The Resurrection Gauntlet. Torchwood had only ever managed to “resurrect” someone for a few minutes but in this instance Suzie stayed alive for much longer than that. She told Jack once what it was like to _properly_ die, describing it as nothing but darkness, never-ending darkness.

Sometimes in his dreams Jack remembers that darkness and wakes, either from a nightmare or from death itself it’s hard to say. He always thought of it as a kind of purgatory, a stage one moved into just before they passed on, but Suzie had challenged that assumption. He was haunted by the thought that death was nothingness, and though he usually forgot the experience when he awoke, when Jack was conscious after death, it terrified him.

Of course he never stayed dead for long. Eventually something hot and strong would pull Jack from death and he awoke gasping for air, as if he’d been drowning.

The first thing the Captain felt after being shot was the _drip drip drip_ of something warm and wet on his face. When it fell against his lips he recognized the taste of iron: it was blood.

Jack jerked himself away from the wheels of the hospital bed to find the officer that had shot him now standing over Sam. The kid had been dragged out of his bed and was lying limply in the corner, his wrists raw and bleeding, strips of skin over the knuckle peeled clean off. Jack jumped to his feet and noticed the handcuffs were still attached to the bed, both ends locked tightly. His stomach flipped when he saw blood and skin embedded in the metal.

“ _What the hell are you doing_?!”

The officer was staring at him with a wicked look of curiosity. Even more wicked were his bright green eyes, illuminating the man's face in a sickly green glow.

Sam’s warnings came flooding back in to the Captain’s mind: green eyes, possession, and something about UNIT. He was so used to civilians babbling about things they’d seen and didn’t believe, second-guessing them and filling in the blanks. But this kid knew exactly what he saw, and the certainty of it had misled him.

“Stop right there!” Jack cried, pulling his trusted Webly from its holster. The officer stopped his advance but he was smiling, not as afraid of staring down the barrel of a gun as Jack had hoped.

“Go ahead,” it urged. ”That will work on me as well it did on _you_.”

“What do you want?” Jack asked warily.

“…revenge.” It said simply, eerily.

 “Against him?” He nodded towards Sam, who remained pale and still in the corner.

It looked back at the kid like it’d forgotten him. “That’s just a cheap thrill,” it explained with a laugh. “I meant you, _Jack_.”

The Captain noisily stepped backwards into the defibrillation machine by Sam's bedside. “You wouldn’t be the first alien I’ve pissed off. Or…whatever you are. Actually that’s a good question, what are you?”

As Jack stepped sideways it stepped forward. “I used to be human, that’s where I remember you. Everything else was burned away but that _one_ memory of _you_ …”

Jack laughed nervously. “I hope it was a good one,” he tried to joke with a lopsided grin. With his free hand Jack pushed the defribillation machine aside and one of the paddles fell off, clattering against the stand that held it.

“Imagine my surprise,” it continued, “when I find you topside and not a day older.”

“I use a really great face cream.” Jack’s free hand scrambled with the paddle, blindly searching for the switch on the defibrillator.

“And the only thing I can think of is how much I want to kill you…But since that's not possible, I'll just have to be more  _inventive_.”

It rushed forward just as Jack found the switch, grabbing both paddles from behind his back. There was a momentary whine as they charged, and Jack could see the officer grow confused before Jack slammed the paddles against the his chest. The officer jerked back violently at the sudden jolt, bashing into the hospital bed. It pivoted into the Captain’s side and sent him sprawling to the ground.

When Jack got back to his feet again the officer was already recovering from the shock. Jack grabbed the bed once again and with a sharp shove he jammed it straight into the the man’s gut, sending him hurling backwards through the thin sheet of plastic covering the window. Jack raced to the ledge and watched the green-eyed man fall from ten stories.

That was the exact moment Captain Jack realized his stint with UNIT was over. He turned from the ledge and back to Sam. Jack ripped a sheet from the bed and ran to the kid’s side, leaning down beside him.

“Sam!” Jack said, gripping his shoulder and shaking lightly. “Sam stay with me, I’m getting you out of here.”

Sam’s pulse was faint but steady and to Jack’s relief the kid finally opened his eyes, groaning at the effort. Sam looked up at the Captain but he was miles away.

“…Dean?”

Jack began to tear the sheet into strips, wrapping them about Sam’s torn up wrists. He’d lost a lot of blood, maybe too much. “You’re going to be fine,” Jack insisted to no one but himself.  “You’re going to _be just fine_.”

“…don't leave me like this, you jerk.” After that brave struggle for consciousness, Sam’s eyes closed and his head fell back.

“Damnit,” Jack growled. “You’re not getting off _that_ easy.”

He reached out to shake him awake once more but then spotted the vortex manipulator about his wrist. _Fuck._ UNIT was tracking him with this. No doubt they had installed some shitty piece of technology, easily disabled if he had the time, but for once in his life that was something Jack was short on. General Erisa would figure out he was responsible before she even found out what happened and there was no telling what that woman would do to him in the name of containment. The Captain shuddered, the cold memory of being buried alive, or being encased in a block of cement unconsciously trickling out of the padlocked box he kept them in. But Jack planned on being _very, very,_ far away by then.

As the Captain saw it, in this split second, he had two choices: either ditch his manipulator or disable it. As a piece of technology that had defined him for so long, Jack was reluctant to leave his little wrist strap behind, even more reluctant when he thought of UNIT getting their hands on it. No, it was too dangerous to leave but it was also too dangerous to keep if UNIT could still track him. 

Jack was struck with another idea as he remembered the defibrillator across the room. If he opened the battery and wired an electric shock straight into the manipulator’s core it might short wire it, along with the tracking device. It was risky and kind of stupid, but that was him in a nut shell wasn't it.

Wrapping the bedsheet around Sam's wrist for the upteenth time, Jack reluctantly left his side. He had to be quick.

Ripping off his manipulator the Captain opened the leather flap covering the 51st century device and pulled back the thumb size panel that led to the battery. He laid it across the machine like a watch and once again pressed the paddles together, letting them charge. He closed his eyes until he heard that familiar whine. When he glanced back down at his faithful wrist strap Jack winced.

“Oh. This is going to hurt…”

He looked away and pressed the paddles down. There was a _zap_ that sent the manipulator shooting out from under him. Jack retrieved it, waving away the smoke and tenderly touching where the leather had been scorched, remembering fondly that Rhys had spent 50 quid to replace the strap for him before. When the manipulator cooled Jack flipped it open again. A single blue light flickered and faded and when Jack pressed some random buttons nothing happened. It had worked; the one thing that had, unfortunately, gone right today.

Solemnly sliding the dead device into his pocket Jack went back to Sam and shook him lightly. “Sam, _wake up_. C’mon.”

Sam’s eyes cracked open but they were glassy and unfocused. _Good enough_ , Jack thought, as he slid an arm around him. Leaning Sam on the wall to his left Jack got them both on their feet. The kid was too big to carry out of here, so Sam was going to have to start helping himself if either of them wanted to stumble out there before someone started ask who had pushed the janitor out the window.

“Alright,” Jack grunted. He had Sam’s right arm draped over his own shoulder and was using his left hand to hold Sam up. “Now you’ve got to walk. Yeah…just like that, good.”

They had made it to the door when Sam finally realized himself. “What’s happening?” he whispered hoarsely.

Jack pried himself away from Sam just long enough to kick the door open. He dragged Sam out with him and when they were partially down the hallway he pulled the fire alarm. Then Jack adjusted Sam’s arm about his neck and grinned crookedly. “We’re running!”

The alarm triggered sudden panic, just as Jack intended, and in the rush and confusion of everyone else trying to leave a pair of nurses helped Sam-the-escaping-convict down the stairs and into a car Jack didn’t own. They didn’t ask about Sam’s injuries, or Jack’s military regalia, leaving with a pair of kind smiles to help any others.

Jack boldly hopped into the driver’s side and ripped open a panel, pulling at the wires. Sam sat beside him, weary but aware of himself.

“This is impossible,” he muttered.

“Not really,” Jack said, concentrating on his crime. “Once you steal a Chula war ship _this_ is like taking candy from a baby.” Jack paused, “Not that I advise doing either.” When the car finally sparked to life the Captain swung his legs inside.

Sam watched him through heavy lids; it took all of his remaining strength to stay focused. “…why are you doing this? You could have left me, should have.”            

The Captain hesitated, turning to Sam. “I wasn't going to leave you even _if_ you were guilty of more than a bad hair day. You were right Sam. And even though that thing fell out a window I have a feeling it’s not done with me yet.”

Sam chuckled darkly, shaking his head. “No. It’ll be back…”

“You know a lot about whatever that was don’t you?” Sam stared out the window, silent as Jack put the car into gear, an edge of warning in his voice. “I probably saved your life back there Sam, saved you from life in prison at any rate. So you’re going to tell me what you know.”

As the car began to move, Sam turned to him spitefully. “ _I saw you die.”_

But Jack ignored the accusation, acting as if he hadn't heard the kid. “Plus you owe me somewhere to stay since you turned my place into a _crime scene_.” He glanced back at Sam as they pulled out onto the main street, a fire truck racing past them. “So. Where to?”


	5. Devils & Dust

Jack kicked an empty beer bottle across the warped and uneven floorboards of a decaying home. “Nice place,” he smirked.

“Four stars all the way,” Sam countered, sinking onto an old wooden chair that groaned under the weight of his sarcasm.

The kid had directed him to an abandoned house, miles outside of town. With two stories of rotting wood, slowly trying to become one, it was complete with weeds, an overgrown lawn, and plants sprouting from its dilapidated sides. It was the picture perfect place to get murdered and dumped in, which Jack initially suspected him of. But once he was inside, it was obvious Sam had been squatting here for some time.

They went past the foyer and into what had once been a handsome dining room. Sam sat there now in the pale light coming from a broken window, perfectly comfortable surrounded by peeling wallpaper and rotting wood. The table to his right was covered in books, some written in Latin and bound in hide with strange symbols burnt into their covers. A few had been left open revealing old prints of monsters, demons, and other feared creatures torturing humanity. To Jack one of these illustrations looked a bit like a Weevil, though it was hard tell without the blue jumpsuits he usually dressed them in.

Scattered amongst the books were pages of notes and a diary filled with similar scribbles. Intermixed with all of this there was also a switchblade, a .45, a sawed off shotgun, a series of empty shell casings next to a bag of salt, a flask with a cross on it, another wooden cross atop a pile of fake ids, vials full of water, small black bags, and rolls of bandages and cotton balls – some already bloody.

Jack was mildly impressed by the collection of supernatural paraphernalia. It was clear Sam had dedicated his life to the creatures in his books and it filled Jack with an odd sense of wonder. As Captain Jack he had guided his newest Torchwood recruits into the knowledge of extraterrestrial life. He brought them under his wing, tried his best to protect them while opening their eyes and giving them a purpose beyond themselves. But here was some kid in a rotting house in Montana that had discovered all those creepy crawlies himself and decided to do something about it. Even if it was a stupid idea to do it alone, Jack admired the foolish conviction of it.

At the same time, it made him wary. Jack understood human nature and their tendency to shoot first and ask questions later (The Captain himself could be accused of the same thing) and considering he had just died and resurrected, a house full of bullets and books on non-human monsters didn't exactly scream "welcome" to him.

Jack stood on the opposite side of the table from Sam, watching him wearily press a bottle of water to his lips and drink. The kid was tough. To be ripped from a pair of cuffs like that and just keep going was…kind of insane. The kind of insane a man who had been shot, stabbed, blown up, etc. and still persevered could appreciate.

Aware of the Captain’s scrutiny, Sam wiped his mouth on the back of his bandaged hand and stared up at him suspiciously. “Why are you here again?”

"A thank you might be nice," Jack smirked. He held Sam's gaze for a split second, before the kid turned away uncomfortably, jaw practically wired shut.

The carnage of the hospital replayed in the back of Jack’s mind. Susan’s death signaled a departure with UNIT, and a departure with UNIT meant the end of any hopes to bring back Torchwood. His dedication to Torchwood had given the Captain a sense of purpose, of responsibility. Now he was just Captain of ashes; he had nothing and he couldn’t bear to admit it. In the car on the way here, Jack decided to chase after this demon instead of facing his own, but he needed Sam to show him how.

“I already _told_ you," Jack started again. "I want to know everything you do.”

“Right,” Sam nodded skeptically. “About demons. Because none of this ‘existence of hellspawn’ stuff seems to bother you?”

Jack wiggled his fingers in mock fright. “OOoooOOh!!”

 “… _haha_.”

He felt the kid’s gaze slowly dissecting him. Obviously he would have to earn Sam’s trust, if only to dissuade him from shooting him and burying in a hole out back. Jack smiled to himself, he always liked a challenge. “ _Listen_ , there are a lot of people out there trying to figure out what goes bump in the dark.”

“Uh-huh. And that’s you is it?”

“Actually, yeah. But this time’s different.” Jack leaned back, arms crossed, doing his best to look serious. “Because I have never, ever, in my entire life, run into an officer _that ugly before_.” Sam stared at him blankly and Jack finally grinned. “Plus the green eyes were kind of weird.”

He could tell Sam was trying _not_ to smile and Jack knew he’d jumped the first hurdle. Noticeably, they both relaxed.

“So…when you say a lot of people you mean _UNIT_ and when you say things in the dark you mean…” Sam raised his brows, inviting Jack to finish for him, reluctant to say the word aloud himself. But Jack sat there waiting for him with a smirk. “… _aliens_.”

“Bingo.”

Sam laughed. “Seriously?”

Jack shrugged, letting the hunter's doubt roll off his back. “You’re looking for monsters, different _species_ , things you can’t explain, what’s the difference?”

Sam fell silent, thinking. “Okay, so let’s say for a minute aliens do exist. Then what? There’s a whole government agency dedicated to that kind of stuff?”

“Discovery of new technology, studying of new species...”

“All for the impending alien invasion?” Sam mocked.

The Captain's eyebrow jerked upward in offense. “Hey. There’s _been a few_.”

“Yeah well there’s been a few demon invasions too, and no one’s been there to help _us_.”

You couldn't avoid the bitterness this kid carried with him. “I didn't know,” Jack said quietly.

Sam drew his lips into a tight line, looking away. “See that’s what I have a hard time believing. You’re supposed to be some kind of Captain but your soldier knew how to fight them, so why don’t you?”

Sam was a rubix cube of frustration, just when Jack thought he'd sorted through one problem there was a whole other side to deal with. “What are you talking about?”

“That woman, she was using salt bullets.” Sam shot up from the chair and reached over to grab an empty shotgun casing as an example. “See demons can’t cross a line of salt, it hurts them so we pack these shells with it. Regular bullets don’t seem to work but at least these sting.”

“We?”

“Me,” Sam corrected, avoiding Jack's gaze and tossing the bullet aside. “I do it.”

The books scattered across the kid's desk stared back up at Jack with a renewed connotation. He tried to imagine UNIT studying the same craziness and found it hard to accept. “But Susan never carried a shotgun.”

Sam sat back down, exhausted again after that burst of adrenaline. “I know. She was carrying a handgun but it was definitely salt bullets. I guess if you have all that time and money you could think of a lot of ways to kill stuff.”

The Captain arched his brows, considering the point. “I don’t work for the government or for UNIT. We’re just in the same field. Unfortunatly.” Jack, smacked his lips together, trying to get rid of the bad taste in his mouth.

“But why would you even be interested in this? You don’t think…” Sam studied the Captain. “You don’t think demons are _aliens_?”

Honestly the thought hadn’t occurred to Jack. Usually when something is out to kill him, he rarely stopped to categorize it. “You seem hostile to the suggestion,” he regarded curiously.

“ _I am_.”

Jack wondered at the sudden emotion, patiently waiting for Sam to explain.

“It’s because they’re not. I mean, maybe it would be easier if I thought they were something else, and by the time they get out of Hell they are but before that….”

“Before that?”

“They’re human,” Sam admitted. “That’s what a demon is, it’s a human soul burnt of everything but hate.”

“In Hell?” Jack asked suspiciously.

Sam nodded, absorbed in some other thought.

Jack ran a hand through his hair with a sigh, with the discovery a new species the Captain was reluctant to get into a theological debate. These things could be burning in the center of Detroit for all he cared, it didn't change what they were _now_. Instead Jack rounded the conversation back to why he was interested in the demon to begin with. “It said it remembered me, that it lost everything but the memory of my face. From when it was human.”

The hunter blanched. “How is that possible?”

“Is it that surprising?” Jack shrugged off the melancholy, stroking his chin with a bright grin. “This jawline is _legendary:_ once seen, always yearned for.”

Sam stared up at Jack in disbelief. The Captain saw doubt and suspicion in the kid's eyes and Jack worried that maybe this was the kind of man that would rather hang Jack up as a trophy than to work with him. But then the scales tipped and he saw a small, tender smile stretch across the hunters face, finally breaking into a low chuckle with a toss of his wild hair.

Jack felt relief, and just a tiny spark of hunger.

“…but you think that’s why it’s after you," Sam said after a beat. "Because it remembers you?”

“ _You’re_ the expert,” the Captain deflected.

Sam chewed this over quietly. Jack watched the kid struggle with himself before tentatively glancing up at Jack again. “If I tell you what I know, then what? You’re going to back to UNIT?”

“No,” Jack said sternly. “If they really knew about all of this then they were lying to me. They want to hide something and I’m going to find out what, but that’s why I need your help. I need to know everything you do.”

“I can do better than that,” Sam asserted. “I can _show_ you.”

Jack tilted his head, leery. Currently he was man without a home, or a job, or a team. His mission was to get Torchwood back but just as soon as that scheme had failed the Captain had suddenly found himself in a new line of business, with the offer of a new team.

The irony didn't escape him.

“We can capture one,” the hunter continued. “I can show you everything.”

“You’re sure?” 

Sam smirked, leaning back into his chair with an arrogance that was meant to mimic Captain Jack. “I’m the expert.”

Jack surveyed the kid in front of him with an appraising smile. He recalled his first impression of Sam: as a wild killer. In this run down home outside of town, with a small arsenal of guns and weapons on hand, Jack's first impression may not have been incorrect. But it also wasn't complete. Sam was oddly gentle, shy even, and this intriqued Jack, almost as much as the discovery of demons. 

The Captain nodded his agreement.

But just when it seemed like they might shake hands and ride off into the sunset there was a sharp knock at the front door. Remembering their struggle at the hospital they exchanged glances; Jack reaching for his Webly, Sam grabbing his shotgun from the table. He motioned for Jack to stay, slowly rising from his chair and inching forward with the gun pointed and ready, fed up at things springing out from behind doors. When Sam swung open the rotting oak he nearly collapsed with relief.

“There you are!” Ruby scolded, brushing past him with little regard for the gun. “I found your crap in some parking lot and I thought you’d moved on me.”

She was carrying the bag of ammunition he had left in the Impala hours earlier, pausing only to hand him a pair of car keys. Glancing outside Sam confirmed his brother’s ride was safely parked in front.

“Sorry,” he said, closing the door and following her inside. ”Something came up.”

Ruby entered the house, already familiar with the holes in the dry wall and the rats nesting beneath them. She passed through the foyer where, a week ago, she had enticed Sam into a series of sins, none of which involved drinking blood. Once she tossed the bag onto an old sofa she spotted Jack in the dining room, holstering a gun of his own. “Who is this?” She demanded of Sam, distrust drawing an ugly line across her temple.

“Captain Jack Harkness,” the stranger said with an attractive smile, holding out his hand invitingly. “And who are you?”

Ruby stared at his open palm and then back at Sam. “Where’d you find Captain Cheesecake?”

Sam chuckled. “Jack, Ruby. Ruby, Jack.”

“ _My pleasure_ ,” Jack said caustically, his hand and his welcome dropping back to his side.

Ruby dismissed the Captain, noticing the bandages around Sam’s wrists and pulling them up to her eye-level for inspection. “What happened?”

Sam winced as the demon ran her fingers over the ripped bed sheets circling his hands. They were already stained through with dried, caked blood. “Good ol’ green-eyes,” he mused.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she growled, letting his hand go. Ruby stared up at him, her pouting lips and emotive eyes belieing the demonic threat that flowed through her host's veins.“You shouldn’t have gone out like that. Not unprepared.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, feeling dizzy at the reminder. “I was back tracking though, didn’t really expect it to show up. I might be dead, or worse, still in custody if it hadn't been for Jack.” Sam stared out at the Captain appreciatvely. It didn't go without notice.

“Sam. Can I talk to you?” Ruby pressed. “ _…alone_?”

Jack was surprised at the sudden eviction, but when Sam nodded his agreement Jack didn't fight it. He made a quip about working with couples and then left them alone. Sam rolled his eyes with a smile, tossing his shotgun atop the duffle bag of ammunition but Ruby was less pleased.

“So. What. You’re just picking up strays now?”

“You should be thanking him,” Sam insisted, though he hadn't said the words himself. 

“I don't do thank you's,” Ruby scowled, switching subjects. “Listen, Sam. The reason I came back? Was to get you and go.”

The hunter turned to back to her slowly. “Why?”

"And I mean _now,"_ Ruby continued in an uncharacteristic rush, "across country, wherever, whatever, but not in this state _."_ Sam had this stupid, confused, look on his face so she slowed down. "Remember that _thing_ we saw in the badlands? Well it’s everywhere _._ I’ve seen six more demons end up as--” her face contorted, recalling the scene “--goo. And I’m telling you, Sam we have _got_ to get out of dodge.”

The hunter shook his head, caught up on some frivolous detail. “Ruby. Where did you suddenly find six more demons?”

“They’re giant stains on the ground, Sam! It’s sort of hard to miss!" Ruby crossed her arms expectantly. "So lets go!”

Sam hesitated. “Ruby...”

“What?” Ruby huffed, glancing back towards the front of the house. “What do you want to do, Sam, stay here...with  _him_?”

“I want to find this demon," Sam insisted. "He tried to kill me, twice. It's personal now."

Ruby stared up at him suspiciously, not buying what he was trying to sell. "You're supposed to be focused on Lilith, remember? What do you care about some other mucus-colored demon?"

"Because I let him get away," Sam said, his eyes dark. "And it got some one killed. If I was stronger maybe...." Sam screwed eyes shut and he felt Ruby's hand on his arm in a sudden display of sympathy. “Just one hunt,” Sam continued, ignoring his previous emotion. “Like I said, I owe him.” 

He reached out for Ruby and drew her close and she looked up at him and smiled tightly. “As long as you remember that bitch isn't going to kill _herself_.”

“I wouldn’t be so lucky,” Sam chuckled. He had one hand on her waist and the other idly stroking her hair in thought. At a drop of a hat they stopped bickering and tried to do their best impression of an intimate couple, their entire relationship hinging on who could best convince the other.

"Ruby..." Sam began with a soft voice, "you once told me you remembered what it was like to be human. What did you mean by that?”

The demon stared up at her hunter-that-wasn't-hunting-her. “I remember what it’s like to lose someone," she admitted. "But I also remember what it’s like to be afraid, and to be comforted.” She picked up Sam’s hand again and gently put it to her face, leaning into his cupped palm. “And I remember what it’s like to love.”

Sam instinctively demurred at her touch but stood his ground with a tight smile. “What about people,” he asked softly. “Do you remember anybody?”

The demon frowned. “Sam…everybody’s dead. They’ve been long dead. When I finally got topside the world was a different _place_.”

“But the people you knew, they’ve had children. right. Did you ever try to look for them?”

“And do what, look them up on ancestry.com?" Ruby yanked herself away and Sam dropped his romantic pretenses. "What the hell kind of question is that?!”

“Green-eyes said it remembered Jack. I just wanted to know if that was possible.”

“Well I hope you two are happy together,” she spat. “And by the way how sick is it that you want to run off with the first _asshole_ that reminds you of your brother?”

Sam felt like he’d been struck across the face. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he growled.

"I know you're still suffering, Sam. Okay?" Ruby pleaded with him and for a second Sam could have believed she genuinely cared. "I get that. You feel like there's a hole in your chest and nothing's every going to fill it: not me, not some random guy of the street."

Sam stared through her, trying to refute the accusation but finding himself unable, his face twisted into some unrecognizable knot.

"But just be careful, alright?" Ruby gently brushed a piece of hair from Sam's face. “You know how to find me.”

And with that Ruby left him, her boots echoing hollowly on the rotting wood. She brushed past Jack on the porch without a word.

The Captain looked up from a leather strap he had been tinkering with and watched her leave. “Does this mean your girlfriend’s not coming?” He asked blithely when Sam finally joined him.

The hunter ignored Jack. “Let’s go,” he said, turning back into the house and beginning to pack. “There’s a case out in North Dakota that I wanted to investigate. If we drive overnight we can find someplace to rest and start in the morning.”

Jack had gravitated towards the living room, taking it upon himself to put together the bag of guns and sling them over his shoulders. “And then what?”

“Then we find a demon.”

 It never took long to collect everything that mattered to him. Sam took a quick mental note of where his stuff was: research material in front of him, his ammunition in the other bag, and his laptop should still be in the car; and now there was Jack. Sam fished out a pair of keys from his pocket, the pair Ruby had given him before she left. He dangled them in the air for Jack to see. The Captain nodded and then held out his hands, motioning for Sam to hand them over but Sam frowned.

“You’re kidding,” he protested.

“No. You’ve lost a lot of blood and I’m surprised you can even stand.” Jack stepped forward and plucked the keys from him. “ _Don’t_ get used to me carrying you.”

Sam didn’t say anything, buckling under the combined weight of the bag and his exhaustion only once Jack’s back was turned. “As if,” he protested to an empty room, after the Captain had already left.

Readjusting the bag over his shoulder Sam stumbled out towards the car and found Jack appraising the Impala from a distance. He turned to Sam with a smirk. “Really?”

Sam dumped his bag by the trunk, leaning on it for a minute. “What’s wrong?”

 “It’s just so… _American_ ,” Jack laughed, his face cracking into a boyish grin. “And not even this century.”

The Winchester brother rolled his eyes. “It's...sort of a family heirloom, a home away from home. Besides, it gets me where I need to go.”

Sam stepped back to let the Captain open the trunk before dumping his bag in, Jack following suit. He was surprised when Jack removed his coat and folded it up with special care, his only contribution to their luggage. Sam realized he’d never once questioned Jack’s bizarre attire because the man wore his WW II relics so comfortably, but now with the coat off it was like the Captain had stripped off a piece of armor. Next to the Impala, Jack was clearly the out-dated one.

“Speaking of the wrong century,” Sam joked, nodding to the coat.

“Hey,” the Captain warned, slamming the trunk closed. “Some things just get _better_ with age.” He winked but Sam shook his head, choosing to dismiss Jack’s….whatever.

Slowly walking around to the passenger’s side, Sam debated if there was a special circle of hell reserved for little brothers that let someone else drive their big brother’s car; he was drinking the blood of a demon but somehow _this_ seemed more sacrilegious. Of course Ruby had to drive the Impala to get it here but Sam preferred not to think about that. If he wasn’t feeling like such shit he would have gone out and rescued it himself, before Ruby had a chance, but letting a total stranger drive was a conscious decision.

Of course in lieu of all the horrible decisions he'd made recently, if getting some rest while some one else drove was the worst of it, Sam decided he could live with that. He sank back into his old spot and the leather seat of the Impala curved around Sam comfortably, as if it had always been waiting for him to return. Jack was inspecting the car from the inside now, curiously touching the steering wheel and dashboard. The Captain turned to him with an approving smile, sliding the keys into the ignition.

“Let’s see what this bad boy can do.”

“Baby,” Sam corrected.

Jack paused and stared at the kid with a raised brow. He didn't mind if Sam started hitting on him but he wasn't going to tolerate pet names.

“That’s the car’s name,” Sam tried to explain with an awkward grin and the Captain smirked in return.

“Okay, then let’s see what _baby_ can do.”

~

This time they drove east. Sam had a map, tracing out the route they were to take from Glendive to Watertown, North Dakota, and gave Jack some vague directions only to fall asleep thirty minutes into the drive. When he woke up the map was in Jack's lap now, it was dark, the stars were out, and they were parked at some drive in.

“Where are we?” Sam asked, briefly startled from waking up next to a relative stranger. 

“Just outside of town,” Jack concluded. “Thought I would try some authentic American cuisine. That’s what people do when they road trip, right?”

Sam glanced outside to the brightly lit neon sign that read Sonic. So much for authentic, unless the Captain was being ironic but Sam had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t. “Yeah…that’s what they do.”

Their waitress came by in a black cap and red polo and Jack greeted her with the same kind of charm, Sam was discovering, that he used on everybody. They ordered something deep fried and disgusting, but Sam was so hungry that for once he didn’t care; he needed some comfort food for the day he’d had.

When the waitress gave Jack her number, Sam thought back to Ruby’s accusation.

Jack reminded him of Dean in some vague kind of way he couldn’t put his finger on. Maybe it _was_ sick to invite him into his life and let him in Dean’s car, in Dean’s seat, but Sam didn’t much care. He wanted to keep the Captain around for the same selfish reason he was going to eat a triple chili cheeseburger in place of his usual leafy greens: because for whatever reason it made him feel better and because life had been _hell_ for the past few months. It wasn't unwarranted, the man _had_ saved his life, so if Jack-the-alien-hunter wanted to try being Jack-the-demon-hunter, it was the least Sam could do. 

For whatever reason they were both in the business of hunting things (even if they might fundamentally disagree on what those 'things' were), and that meant Sam finally had a common bond with someone who wasn't his brother, or another hunter, or a freaking demon. Sam knew nothing about the man sitting next to him, they'd barely discussed their next move but here they sat sharing some cheap, greasy drive through food like they'd been doing this together for years. It was so normal, so mundane, and so familiar that it made Sam's heart ache. His brother had been the only constant, stable thing in his whole life and Sam missed that, in fact he craved it more than the cheeseburger he was shoving into this mouth.

“Woah, breathe,” Jack urged. “It’s already dead, it’s not going anywhere.”

Sam choked on a laugh, letting the burger drop back into its plastic basket. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” The Captain went back to his own fish and chips (so much for American), leaning out the window he had rolled down. Jack was looking up at the stars and Sam watched them through the window as well, appreciating the cool night air on his skin, appreciating the _quiet_.

It was only broken when Sam realized the grease from the burger was starting to stain his bandages so he dumped it into a paper bag and wiped his hands off on some napkins. “It’s getting late.”

Jack stirred, as if Sam had interrupted him from a dream. “Hmm?”

“Late,” Sam repeated, shoving everything greasy into that little paper bag, hoping to dump it before it burst.

Jack nodded, starting the car again. “We passed a place up the road.”

They left the drive-in and pulled into a motel, the same kind that Sam had checked into a hundred times before. Sam changed his bandages and showered the day’s blood off him. He laid one of the two single beds. Exhaustion overcame him and Sam fell asleep.


	6. Darkness on the Edge of Town

Sam dreamt he was in Hell, his right hand chained to his brother’s suffering, his left chained to his father. It was only a minor relief to wake up and find the source of his agony were the wounds around his wrists, those parts that had been peeled off of him . He woke up sweating and alarmed at the other person in his room, but then he remembered the previous day’s events and the strange sort of hitchhiker he had picked up.

Jack was hunched over a table, dismantling some device encased in a leather wrist strap, pieces of it scattered in front of him. When Sam calmed down, he recognized it from the day before. He had seen the Captain wearing it at the hospital and then later, toying with it at the house. The Captain had made such a striking first impression with his vintage coat and his wrist strap; it was strange to see him stripped bare.

 “You’re up,” Jack said, nodding to a cup of gas station coffee on Sam’s bedside.

Sam reached for it gratefully, wincing as the heat seeped through the bandages wrapped over his hands. He went digging into his bag by the bed, excavating two ibuprofen and after self-medicating Sam stretched lithely, settling into the chair opposite Jack, glancing between his coffee and the strange device.

“What is that thing?”

Jack set the manipulator down with a sigh. “It used to be a part of me. My whole life I’ve had this thing and I’ve never thought twice about it, not until I had to short wire it.”

“Is it broken?” Sam asked, attempting to catalogue the pieces scattered before him on the table and failing miserably.

“Not exactly.” Jack picked up something the size of a pill, small, and filled with a blue liquid. “The battery’s drained, but it just needs to absorb some rift energy. The _real_ problem is this damn tracking device. UNIT had it installed but it’s harder to remove than I thought, and if I can’t get rid of it then this is useless to me.” He tossed the wrist strap on the table, silently admitting defeat.

Sam nodded, processing Jack's disappointment. There was a stream of technobabble embedded in that sentence that Sam didn't understand, which was funny to him because the younger Winchester usually felt that was his forte. “I thought you said you were working with UNIT. Now they’re planting tracking devices?”

“I never said it was _voluntary_.”

“You’re running from them,” Sam concluded with surprise. When Jack had introduced himself as a Captain, Sam had imagined him as a man of great esteem, working with the military and with a handful of soldiers at his command; but Jack was actually a loner; Susan was a borrowed soldier; and Jack had never been associated with UNIT. It made Sam wonder: what, then, was this man Captain of?

“ _So are you_ ,” Jack reminded him. “Still,” he rubbed at his left wrist and laughed nervously, “I can’t help feeling kind of naked.”

Sam arched his neck and tugged a small necklace out from under his t-shirt, revealing a golden charm with a fat smiling face, dangling from a black string. “Maybe it’s not the same but this thing has been around since I was a kid. A family friend gave it to me and I gave it to my brother as a Christmas gift.” He touched the smiling face distantly. “I bet he’d feel the same way.”

The reminder of his recent death hung heavily between them. Jack said nothing, but his eyes swelled with the painful understanding. They shared a moment of silence together, Sam drinking his coffee and Jack pretending to fix his manipulator. When enough time had passed to balm their mourning, Jack spoke up again.

“So what’s on the agenda for today?”

Turning to his jacket draped over the chair, Sam dug out the map he had been using to navigate last night; intuitively, Jack swept the pieces of his manipulator into a small pile, giving Sam the space to fold it out. From his other pocket Sam found a sharpie and proceeded to circle a number of areas on the perimeter of town.

"Alright, you wanted to learn how to hunt demons, so here’s your first lesson.”

The Captain was used to giving the orders, not to taking them, but even though Sam didn't swagger about with his own sense of self-worth, he was still a natural leader. So Jack crossed his arms and sat back in his chair, watching the Winchester brother with a bemused smirk.

Barometric pressure drops, electrical storms, and unusual deaths were all possible demonic omens. Sam explained that any number of these things by themselves could be coincidence but a combination of the two always spelled trouble, and it was their job to discover the pattern and investigate. In this case, the town of Aberdeen, South Dakota was suffering from major crop failures and the farms that had been hit the hardest were circled on the map. South Dakota Wheat Growers was one of the biggest companies in that county and their failure had led to massive layoffs and a general sense of despair. Again, it might have just been coincidence if there hadn’t been three mysterious deaths over the course of a week at the grain warehouse near the edge of town.

Sam said he had spent some of his spare time investigating this and clarified that one of the deaths had ruined an entire shipment of grain due to the “unmistakable reek of sulfur”. This, he insisted, proved that there was demonic activity and the best place to start was in that particular warehouse where all three deaths had occurred.

Jack nodded, absorbing the information. The Captain had no idea what any of Sam’s information really meant, and it absolutely thrilled him. “So what do we do?”

The map was folded up with conviction. “We lay a trap.”

~~

On the southwestern edge of Aberdeen, before the river and beside the cemetery there was a plot of land dedicated to growing wheat. On the northern edge there was a single beige warehouse with a curved roof. They pulled up behind it sometime in the early afternoon, trying to disguise the 67’ Chevy Impala amongst a series of other rusted pieces of farm equipment.

Sam made a mental list of what he needed, opening the trunk and then its false bottom. It was the first time Captain Jack had seen the secret stash and he whistled in minor awe at the sudden reveal, admiring the arsenal of weapons, legal and illegal alike. He reached in to pick up an ax, balancing it one hand.

“I’m beginning to think you’re a very dangerous man, Sam.”

The head of the ax wavered as Jack gripped the old, stained handle and Sam’s eyes flickered nervously between the two. “Only if you’re out to kill me.”

Jack shook his head with a smirk and gently tossed the ax back into its place, helping Sam gather the shotguns, rock salt, and spray paint they needed.

Luckily for them the layoffs that had plagued this county meant they could perform their work uninterrupted, and they snuck into the open door of the warehouse without incident. They were greeted with walls of bagged grain, stacked onto pallets, stacked to the ceiling. It created a maze of narrow corridors and when Sam saw this he knew exactly how he wanted to capture their demon.

“Inside this we’ll lay a few traps,” he explained to Jack. “Then we’ll lure it in and drive it towards one or the other. If it thinks it’s chasing us, it’ll be less cautious, more likely to stumble into it.”

“What’s this trap you keep talking about?” Jack questioned.

From his jacket Sam removed his dad’s diary. It fell open to its most worn pages, those describing how to fight a demon. These particular notes on the trap, however, had been Sam’s own personal addition. “It’s a symbol,” he pointed out. “Called a devil’s trap, we paint it on the floor or on a ceiling and once a demon steps inside it they can’t leave.” Sam bound the diary back up and tucked it away. “Then we exorcise it.”

 “And what do I do if it attacks me again?” Jack asked, a slow smile creeping across his face. “Do I need a cross? Do I say the ‘ _power of Christ compels you_ ’?”

Sam frowned.

The Captain had just accused him of being dangerous and even if it was in jest, Sam supposed that was the obvious conclusion to make for anyone discovering some kid with guns in the back of his car running around reenacting The Exorcist. But here was Jack face to face with the unknown and he was _smiling._ This was morbid work for Sam, a cross he had to bare because his brother had died with an imperative on his lips: “keep fighting.” If you forgot that you were either stupid or, in Sam’s opinion, _dangerous_.

“This isn’t funny,” the hunter chided. “They use humans like toys. It’s a game to them, but it’s life and death for us.”

The mirth fell off of Jack’s face, replaced by something else that made Sam suddenly miss his stupid recklessness. He turned away, pulling out a can of black spray paint that he shook in preparation.

“Besides,” Sam muttered, “that movie sucked _._ ”

They drew a devil’s trap outside the maze as an obvious decoy, and then carefully placed two more inside. Marking off certain corridors with lines of salt, they created a winding path to the traps they had hidden. Finally, they armed themselves and waited.

Sam volunteered to lure the demon in, and when he saw the lights flickering he confirmed a farm hand was approaching. After a brief exchange and some holy water, Sam knew they had the right possessed man. He congratulated himself while running the fuck away.

Meanwhile, Jack waited behind a stack of palettes and watched as Sam safely ducked behind a wall of grain. The demon spotted the crudely painted decoy and avoided it easily. Then, thinking it was clear of further trouble, the demon continued after Sam.

Jack double backed, stepping out from behind a crate so that the demon could spot him, drawing him away from Sam. They did this several times, winding the demon around in circles with only ghosts to chase until it finally turned a corner and stumbled into one their traps. It cursed when it realized it had been tricked, Sam revealing himself from behind a wall of bagged grain, Jack stepping over a line of salt.

“Winchester,” it growled, its eyes turning black. The demon recognized Sam which didn’t surprise the last Winchester brother, since everything that crawled out from the pit appeared to know his name, but it glanced at Jack dubiously.

“Captain Jack Harkness,” the hunter-in-training introduced. Sadly the demon was less impressed than the Captain would have liked.

Now that the hunt was over, and the demon caught, Sam could show the Captain a basic exorcism. But before that, he wanted to point out a few other basics, so he dug into his back pocket and tossed Jack a flask. “Here, holy water, it’s the best way to confirm a demon besides cutting them and checking the color of their blood. Plus it comes in handy in a tight spot.”

The demon looked incredulously at the exchange. “Wait. What’s going on here?”

“I’m picking up a new trade,” Jack admitted, unscrewing the flask’s cap. “And you’re my first lesson.”

The demon sneered, staring nervously at the flask. “Well you’ve got quite the teacher. If other hunters knew what he was, he’d be the _first_ thing on their list. Maybe someday he’ll be first on yours.”

It’s taunting drew an ugly expression from Sam, but Jack paid the demon little mind, pouring the water into his hand. It felt normal to him as he rubbed it against his fingers, but when he flicked it at the demon the water burnt its skin.  Curious at the result, Jack continued his onslaught.

“The power of Christ compels you…”

“ _Jack_ ,” Sam warned, exhuming his father’s diary once again and flipping open to the correct page. “Enough. Let’s do this.”

Reluctantly the Captain obeyed. Sam tried to show him the exorcism that they would chant but Jack was too lost in thought, studying the demon and the circle it stood in.

“Sam…have you ever tried to ask it anything? Find out what it wants?”

“It doesn’t _want_ anything,” Sam said carefully, “except to kill and cause destruction because it’s fun.”

“No please,” the demon insisted. “Let’s play 20 questions before the newbie sends _me back to the pit!_ ” The demon suggested this as a threat, but Jack accepted the invitation anyway, tightening and untightening the cap to the flask as a reminder of the harm he could do to it.

Sam didn’t like this. He could sympathize with a man who wanted to know more about the supernatural and the questions it raised, but to see Jack, who had just learned of holy water, quickly repurpose it as a means of torture made Sam doubt the kind of person he had so easily placed his trust in.

He watched Jack slowly walk the perimeter of the devil’s trap, sizing up his target like he knew exactly what he was doing.

“What are you?” the Captain began.

“Oh great. An _existential_ hunter.”

Jack ignored the demon’s jeering, deciding to answer his own question. “So far I know you’re a viral life form. I know that you need a host to exist, or maybe just to blend in. I know that you invade through the lungs and from there…probably the nervous system right? You attach yourself to that while passing through the blood stream providing total control over the host.”

Sam arched his brows. Jack made this sound scientific, as if a demon was little different than a dog or cat instead of the paranormal thing that had ruined his family’s lives.

“We’ve got ourselves a fancy pants,” the demon mocked.

Jack smiled in self-satisfaction. “Not bad for a newbie. But you still didn’t answer my question: what are you?”

“The thing that’s going to kill you when I get back out.”

Jack was unmoved by the threat. “Out of where?”

“Hell,” the demon laughed dryly, but Jack rejected that answer.

“That’s the _human_ name for it. What do _you_ call home?”

 “ _Hell_. The perfect vacation spot for everyone you’ve ever known.”

“ _There’s no such thing_ ,” Jack insisted, voice tightening. “It’s just a name you hide behind because it scares people. But you got here somehow, through the Rift maybe, or something else.”

The Captain was becoming agitated, Sam saw it and so did the demon, a wicked smile stretching across its host’s face.

“And what if it wasn’t? What if you really had to accept that your loved ones are dying in agony, day after day, moment after moment?”

“Jack,” Sam cautioned, hoping to dissuade the Captain from this useless crusade. He was all too familiar with how a demon could get in your head and scramble your thoughts.

“Because then you’d have to face facts wouldn’t you?” it continued. “That there is no peace after death and whatever you tell yourself to numb the pain is a _lie._ Because the moment you forget, the moment you’re ever happy again or even a little content, there are a hundred souls burning beneath your feet all cursing your name: Captain Jack Hark—”

Jack poured the rest of the holy water on the demon and watched with satisfaction as it burned. Sam jumped at the sound of its screeching, tearing Jack from the edge of the devil’s trap. At first the Captain fought him off, Jack’s face so contorted by some buried grief he didn’t see the difference between Sam and the demon. It wasn’t until his back hit the wall of bagged grain behind him that Jack appeared to remember he was in a warehouse in South Dakota and not some place from his own nightmares.

“It _wants_ you to get angry,” Sam explained. “If you’re angry, you make mistakes.” He shoved at the Captain’s shoulders, irritated at this whole diversion. “Don’t make it easy for them.”

Jack watched Sam with a guarded expression but he wasn’t apologetic.

“Let’s just get this over with.” Sam turned his back on the Captain, retracing his steps to pick up the diary he had dropped.

The demon had fallen prostrate from the water and was already recovering. Sam watched it carefully, silently thumbing through the pages of his book as the farmhand tentatively pushed itself up from inside the trap. That’s when he also noticed a scuffmark on the outer circumference of the circle. With alarm, Sam glanced at Jack’s shoes and saw black paint on the edges of his soles: the trap had been broken.

“…shit.”

Just as he registered this, the demon sprang free, smashing Sam into the wall of grain behind him. It felt like hitting cement. His body hardly made a dent in the tightly packed stack of grain but at the top of the wall the bags shuddered like Jenga blocks and fell forward, burying Sam in heavy bricks of wheat.

He heard the shotgun go off but it must have missed, since one of the bags above him burst and he was suddenly showered in brown kernels. Eventually Sam pulled off one of the heaviest bags pinning him, spitting out the grain that was in his mouth, in his hair, in places he needed to pick out later.

He stumbled to his feet to find the demon had pinned Jack to the warehouse wall opposite him. With a switchblade in its hand it looked as if he was considering slicing open Jack’s mouth. There was no choice; he would have to exorcise it using what he had learned.

Sam pushed away from the bags and stepped over the devil’s trap, hand extended. The demon was just about to dig his knife into Jack’s flesh when he started to choke. The hunter could feel the darkness lurking inside the farmhand and so he wrapped his mind around it and began to pull. He felt some resistance as the farmhand continued to pin Jack against the wall, bent on scarring him, but Sam knew he could do this. He shut his eyes and dug deeper, feeling his own will overwhelm the demon, hearing its host begin to choke again on the smoke that rolled out of its mouth. He squeezed the demon out of the man like juicing a fruit and when he was sure he had hollowed out every last drop he let go.

The farmhand crumpled to the ground, freeing Jack who sank against the wall, his lips bleeding from where the knife had nicked him on the way out.

“Nice job.” Jack gave him a crooked smile, panting from the close call. “With the whole…” he waved his hand like Sam had a done a magic trick but his exhaustion cut the demonstration short. 

Reaching down to check the farmhand’s pulse Sam avoided the Captain’s thanks, wary of the secret power he had revealed to a man he honestly knew nothing about.  He pressed his fingers into the neck and waited, but there was no pulse. 

“He’s dead,” Sam announced, stepping back from the body.

He didn’t bother to help Jack up, choosing instead to dig out his father’s diary from its grainy grave. It was under a sack at the edge of the mound he had been buried under, so he pulled it out and shook it free of any spare kernels. When he glanced back Sam found Jack kneeling at the edge of the trap, tracing where his angry scuffle had broken the circle. _Now_ the Captain looked sorry and Sam felt indignation rise in his gullet.

“I _told_ you it was pointless,” Sam spat.

Jack didn’t bother to return his hostility, staring into the center of that circle, but his silence only helped to fuel Sam’s sanctimonious anger.

“This kind of job takes _trust_. And what you did back there--if you have some sort of secret agenda…” He clutched the journal in his hand, the pressure of twenty-some years of hunting making his bones ache, causing the raw flesh on his wrists to blister and burn. “Then don’t include me, okay? I have enough _shit_ on my plate.”

He collected his gun and abandoned the Captain with the evidence of their failed hunt.

It was midafternoon when he stepped out of the warehouse. The sun was hot and bright in the sky and the Impala’s tar black exterior boiled under Sam’s touch. Gingerly opening the trunk he threw his supplies back inside. Sam took a moment to scan over his inventory, the tools of his trade that had destroyed his family and the only things giving his life any meaning. He felt some bitter conclusion churning in his gut but the buzzing of a thousand cicadas in the distance drowned his mind, refusing to give him any clarity.

He shut the trunk, not surprised to see Jack standing by the passenger side door.

“Does this mean I flunk?” the Captain asked.

“I don’t know what it means. Except maybe this was a mistake.” He circled the car to the driver’s side, refusing to look at Jack or his dark reflection in the Impala’s chrome ceiling. “But you got what you wanted, I showed you everything. Now I think, maybe you should go.”

“Everything but the exorcism,” Jack corrected.

He threw his dad’s legacy at the Captain. “Then take it!”

The car door slammed as Sam reclaimed his brother’s seat. He slid the keys into the ignition but that’s when his anger abandoned him. He fingered the keys, trying to build up the fortitude to drive off without Jack and go back to his old life with Ruby and drinking demon’s blood but he couldn’t. Sinking into the seat Sam sat and stared out into the road.

Out here on the edge of town the pavement turned quickly into gravel. If he went east he would head back towards Aberdeen, approximately the same way they had come. Once they passed through town Sam would know how to get to a major highway and from there any other city he pleased. If he went west the going was longer, the terrain less smooth, but eventually the country would spit him out onto another highway, another state, another town. It didn’t matter to Sam because he knew where that highway _always_ led.          

Tired, and with bleary eyes, he looked out the passenger side window to see Jack outside, thumbing through the diary. They had left the windows rolled down on the way here, and though Sam had shut himself inside the Impala he could still hear Jack’s feet shift in the gravel, his sweaty palms on the dry pages, and his unsteady voice as he began to test out the incantation.

“ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_ …”

Despite himself, Sam smiled. “That’s…actually pretty good.”

Captain Jack leaned into the window, the diary hanging from his left hand, a small pale patch of skin on his wrist where, Sam imagined, that strap of his had always sat.

“I’m a little rusty,” Jack admitted. “Last time I was in Rome I had to learn on my feet, it was the only way you could get anything. But now the only Latin I remember is: _Ubi est meretrix domum_?”

Sam narrowed his eyes, attempting to translate from the little Latin he had retained in college. “Which way to the whorehouse!?”

Jack’s grin was unabashedly wide. “Like I said: a little rusty.”

Sam didn’t laugh, though he wished he could and it was clear that it bothered Jack.

“I had to, Sam. It’s different for me.” His boyish grin grew cold, stony, and Sam studied it from his spot behind the wheel. “I had to ask.”

“About Hell?”

Jack said nothing, just lowered his gaze.

“It’s _not_ different,” Sam insisted, shaking his head in rebuttal. “Even if…you can’t die, or whatever your deal is, I’ve lost people too, my whole family to these things. And I hope --” the words ‘to God’ started to form on his lips but Sam thought better of it. “With everything that I have that it _doesn’t_ exist, for their sakes. And I hope that demons really are just some kind of sick twisted creatures from another planet, _but I don’t really know_. Regardless of everything I’ve ever done I don’t _really_ know. Nobody does.”

Jack nodded silently. He met Sam’s gaze and folded up the diary, placing it onto the passenger’s seat. “Then you’ll need this.”

Sam stared at the bounded diary, the ghost of his father rising up and telling him to drive, to go on, to continue the work alone, but he never was a very good soldier. Leaning over the seat Sam opened the passenger door and gently pushed it open. Jack caught the door and hesitated, but finally he pushed the book out of his way and settled inside the car.

Sam ran his hand over the steering wheel, sure of the decision he’d just made. “But I do know one thing. Whether or not Hell exists, not everyone goes there.”

They pulled out of the lot and left the warehouse behind, driving until they found a highway that was alive and endless but they didn’t care where they went so long as they had someone sitting in the seat next them.


	7. New Life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sam and Jack travelled across the country, teaching each other what they did best. They hunted more than just demons, chasing after ghosts, vampires, shape shifters, and even a werewolf. For every monster they found Sam had a way to kill it. That’s what hunters did, they found out what they were dealing with and they destroyed it without the luxury to stop and ask questions. If you wanted to know what werewolves really were, or where they came from, chances are you’d either end up dead or wake up one day with an inexplicable desire to howl at the moon.

Jack, on the other hand, wanted to know. It wasn’t a scientific fascination he had, he would never put either of them in danger, and if he had to shoot something to protect them both he never hesitated. Jack was just excited to see something new, to have discovered the unknown because the man had an insatiable spirit for adventure; or just a desire to get killed, it was hard to tell.

Nine times out of ten, however, Jack had already seen whatever they were hunting, and would give bizarre explanations about the origins of the things they fought. According to Jack vampires were really a race of carnivorous fish-like people that used perception filters to hide in human form. Shape shifters were actually Nostrovites and Jack had a story about a friend getting mysteriously pregnant by one the day before her wedding. Sam listened, enraptured, unable to tell if Jack was telling some impossible lie or an even more impossible truth.

Their common enemy was the green-eyed demon, and once Sam determined that Jack was ready they would drive back to Montana and stop it. Until then they were allies from two different worlds of thought, even though as allies they knew nothing about each other. As long as it didn’t inhibit their ability to hunt, their respective pasts didn’t seem to matter, and perhaps it would have stayed that way indefinitely had Jack not gotten himself killed again.

They drove to New Orleans, Louisiana and stopped by the LeCarpentier-Beauregard-Keyes House where the Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard was said to haunt it. Two accidental deaths inside the house from “mishandling of historic objects” -- namely a sword that kept ending up inside of people instead of on the wall -- drew their attention and they decided to investigate. Beauregard had once been a part of the Confederate army and while he was alive everyone knew how disgruntled he was at surrendering to the north. Now in death, he was said to challenge northerners to duels in order to reclaim some kind honor over his miserable campaign.

The southern style mansion had been turned into a museum. It was privately owned but in a small town with little security, breaking in proved fairly easy.  When the house was open for tourists Sam and Jack propped open a window and later that night they snuck back inside. They searched the house looking for any remnant left of the General. Since it was his home, it could have been anything, but after a few hours they decided to focus on his study upstairs. The study had been polished and restaged as if the General still lived there today, an unwitting invitation for the long-dead southerner to linger.

“It says here, while enlisted in the US Army he was given the nickname ‘Little Napoleon.’” Sam stepped back from a placard below a respectably sized oil painting of the General. He had his arms crossed and he looked down at them with a suspicious frown.

Jack was inspecting an officer’s sword mounted on the wall, fingering the hilt and drawing it from its scabbard. “I met Napoleon once.”

Sam turned to Jack with a raised brow, mirroring the portrait behind him: both Sam and Beauregard were unimpressed.

“Honestly! He made you forget how short he was.” Jack grinned lewdly. There might have been more to the story but Sam didn’t want to know. “Do you think ‘Little Napoleon’ was a nickname for something else?” Jack leered, and then laughed.

It was this kind of derision to his long-gone honor that summoned the ghost of General P.G.T. Beauregard. He accused Jack of being a Yank “or worse” and then, just as the legend said, challenged him to a duel. Jack, idiot that he was, accepted and with the General’s sword in one hand and a bar of iron in the other they battled it out. In the meantime, Sam was left scrambling for the remaining piece of Beauregard’s DNA.

Inside the General’s desk Sam found an embroidered handkerchief with letters P.G.T.B on it. Thinking this might the key, Sam struck a match and set the handkerchief alight. As he did, he heard the sickening gush of steel piercing flesh. The General’s ghost went up in flames along with his handkerchief but he left behind his sword embedded in Jack.

Sam’s mind went completely blank at the horror of a blade protruding from Jack’s chest, the hilt buried in his back. Whatever resurrection miracle he thought he’d seen at the hospital a week ago he instantly forgot, the memories of death and abandonment all too recent for him. He dropped the flaming kerchief and straddled his fallen friend, holding his head and calling his name. It took him a full five minutes of grief for the hunter to gain enough sense to pull the sword out of Jack’s back and when Jack finally came gasping back to life seconds later, Sam nearly jumped out his skin.

“He cheated!” were the Captain’s first words. His eyes bristled with righteous indignation, though they’d been glazed over in death seconds before. Jack got to his feet and shrugged off his greatcoat, sticking a finger through the hole the sword had rendered. “It’s not fair,” he moaned. Then, as if he’d done nothing more phenomenal than wake up from a nap, he turned to Sam. “I take it you got him? What was it?”

Sam couldn’t tell what was more extraordinary: Jack’s sudden miracle or his complete ambivalence towards it. It took him a few seconds to realize what Jack was even asking for: ghost hunting seemed mundane in the face of resurrection. “Oh…it uh, it was a handkerchief.”

Jack nodded in satisfaction, ignoring any hesitation on Sam’s behalf and draping the wounded coat over his arm. “Case closed then. Let’s get going, and maybe find a tailor…”

“Umm…” Sam motioned to where Jack had lain on the floor moments before, the sword that had killed him still unsheathed and covered in his blood. “Do you wanna maybe explain what just happened?”

“What?” Jack held his coat defensively. “I lost. Don’t rub it in.”

“No you died,” Sam corrected.

“I’m fine.”

Sam shook his head in exasperation. “You were just dead. And now you’re not, how is that fine?”

 Jack’s boyish evasion melted, revealing an uneasy suspicion. “I thought you knew. I thought it didn't matter.”

Sam shook his head. “This is different from the hospital, Jack. Maybe then I suspected something, but I had almost died myself. I know what I just saw, and we’re partners now. I need to know if…if I’m supposed to bury you or not.”

Jack shut his eyes, repentant. This thing of his was a fissure that ran through him, the effects of which he spend most of his life trying to mask with cocky smiles and lewd comments.

“There’s not much to tell,” Jack conceded. No longer trying to run, he turned back into the room and sat on the edge of the General’s desk. “A long time ago something happened to me, and now I can’t die.”  He sat under the puritanical gaze of the General’s oil portrait trying to summarize something he had lived with for hundreds of years but still didn’t understand.

“I was in a battle that I didn’t expect to win. I remember dying but then I just…woke up. Everyone else was dead, except for me and two of my friends. I went back to earth to find them but I got stuck and so I waited for them. That’s when I started to notice something wasn’t right. At first it was minor stuff, cuts that healed too quick, bruises that disappeared overnight, but then I got a spear through the gut and when they pulled it out of me I just…walked away. That’s when I knew.”

Sam studied Jack intensely for the length of his monologue. He commiserated with a man who had been handed a different life with no reason or explanation. It reminded him of his own curse. 

"I guess that means you also have a regenerative quality?" Sam asked. "Cause the last immortal I knew had to steal people's organs when his failed."

" _Ew_ , and no. My organs work just fine thank you. No complaints so far," Jack grinned.

“Well…it’s strange,” Sam admitted with a shrug of his shoulders and a bitter smile. “But it’s not like I can judge. I’m not exactly normal myself.”

“I take it you’re not referring to your trunk full of guns?”

Sam snorted. “No.” There was a confession on the tip of his tongue but he hesitated. The idea of Jack turning him away because of what he was choked him, but the Captain sat there patiently waiting, no expectation on his face and so far no judgment. “I have demon blood in me,” he finally admitted. “I was poisoned with it as a kid and it’s given me these powers. That exorcism in the warehouse? That was me, no incantation just my thoughts.”

“Psychic powers,” Jack concluded. He smiled, less disgusted than Sam had predicted and in fact mildly impressed. “Can you tell what I’m thinking?”

“No,” Sam laughed, but it faded quickly. “Does it bother you?”

“Should it?”

“Well…yeah. I’m part demon Jack, how can you not think that makes me –makes what I am, wrong?”

Captain Jack didn’t hesitate. He rose from the desk, looked him straight in the eye, and said “I can’t tell you if it makes you wrong or not, but I can tell you that a lot of normal people could never make it through one day of this. They’re not strong enough, but you are _because_ you’re different. You’re special, Sam.” The hard line across Jack’s face softened. “And from where I’m standing that’s not such a bad thing.”

The assertion made Sam shudder. Without his brother Sam's usual convictions had become numb. The only thing that mattered was getting Dean back and when he found out he couldn’t even do that, Sam had become lost. Jack didn’t know what parts of himself Sam had sacrificed in pursuit of Lilith but he still looked at him, what he was now, and didn’t think of him as a monster but as special.

 _Special_ , the word rang in Sam’s head like a bell. No one had ever called him that before and it stirred up some foreign emotion in him.

“Besides,” Jack continued with his usual cocky, assertive smirk. “As far as freaks go, you’re in good company.”

Sam felt Jack’s hand on his shoulder, pressing his reassurance into him. Sam was confused and honestly a little embarrassed because he didn’t know how to express his gratitude with anything other than a tight smile and no eye contact.

"So," he said, desperate to change the subject. "Ghosts, that's one thing you haven't explained away yet. Let me guess they're projections from another universe," Sam teased, "or some kind of incorporeal alien trying to trick us?"

This was a sort of game they had where they would debate the true identity of what they had just fought. Jack stubbornly refused the existance of demons, angels, or any other kind of unexplained phantasmagoria. He would insist that there was another interpretation avialable and often had one on hand, but at the mention of ghosts, Jack's usual, cheery self became hard as stone. He vividly recalled Ianto's ghost standing before him, how wonderful it was to see him again, how awful it was lose him all over again.

"Ghosts are dead people," Jack said bluntly. "Nothing more." 

~~

After the incident at the Beauregard House, Captain Jack never wore his vintage coat again. He folded it up along with his manipulator and kept it in the back of the Impala. Instead he chose to wear a dark wash jean jacket they had salvaged from their run-in with the shape shifter. Captain Jack Harkness was a persona that Jack had, as of late, not been comfortable with and so he traded in his attention-grabbing regalia for something more rugged, embracing this new life on the road.

Sam was impressed, actually. A week into being a hunter and Jack looked as if he’d been doing this his whole life. “You like this,” Sam mused after another successful hunt. They’d ran into something Sam had never seen before, some sort of weird cybernetic humanoid in a computer lab that had claimed to engineer it. Jack called it a Cyberman before wiring 10,000 volts to the back of its head and watching it fry. It was inventive and ruthless, and Sam could see it gave the Captain a grim kind of satisfaction.

Jack squinted up at him through the midday sun, opening the passenger side door with a crooked grin. “It keeps me young,” he joked. “Why. Don’t you?”

Sam shook his head. “This is my brother’s car,” he said as if it summed up everything about him. Opening the driver’s side door the Impala creaked loudly, agreeing with Sam, and reminding him that the car was borrowed property. “My dad’s before that. This whole life was passed down to me.”

He ducked into the car and Jack followed suit, their doors slamming shut, simultaneously encapsulating them inside Sam’s hand-me-down. The hunter slid his keys into the ignition, pausing to recite his family mantra mechanically, devoid of any conviction: “Hunting things, saving people, the family business.”

Jack studied him intently. “That’s an interesting thing to give your kids.”

Sam’s hands slid off the keys, sinking back into his seat thoughtfully. “I think my brother was the only one who took it seriously, the saving people bit, that’s why he did it. Dad just got eaten up by revenge…” Sam drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, silently acknowledging that was probably going to be his fate as well.

“Your brother, did he die recently?”

Sam’s heart jerked in his chest. He glanced at Jack in surprise because he’d never said anything about his brother dying, at least not outright. Once again Jack had a silent understanding with him, as if he’d lived Sam’s life over tenfold. “Yeah,” Sam finally admitted, his mouth going dry. Was it the first time besides Ruby that he’d ever said it aloud? “About three months ago.”

“Demon?”

“Hellhound,” Sam corrected, “Sold his soul at the crossroads just to save me.” He turned to the Captain with a smirk. “Did I mention I’ve been dead before?”

Jack shrugged his brows. “And here I thought I was unique.” After a moment of reflection he added, “I’m sorry.”

Sam shook his head as if trying to evade Jack’s condolences. “It was stupid. He shouldn’t have done it; I mean it would be him in this car right now instead of me.”

Captain Jack frowned, but if he had some cheeky comment to make about switching brothers he tactfully kept it to himself. “He was looking out for you, that’s what brothers do.” Jack was suddenly quiet, distant, and Sam peered at him thoughtfully.

“Did you-” but then he cut himself off, realizing that asking an immortal man about his family was probably a stupid idea.

“A little brother,” Jack said quietly, “but I wasn’t very good at my job.” He stared out the window at the endless highway before him, replaying the same old clip where he let go of Gray’s hand. “Everyone has their moment at the crossroads Sam, that choice that defines us. And if I’d had the chance to do what your brother did…I would.”

Sam looked away; suddenly guilty for having peaked behind Jack’s mask. It was an unnerving reminder that beneath all of the Captain’s congenial smiles and cocky swagger, there was another man with a dark past. Sam trusted the man that sat in the car with him, but he didn’t trust the man that had lost control in the grain warehouse.

Jack always walled him out, which was something Sam noticed with increasing frequency. The man was a complete enigma and he did little to shed any light on himself.  Jack was his most genuine when he was either hunting, or when he was flirting. In the heat of a hunt Jack was focused, all instincts and reflexes, totally alive, which would be an insane reaction to constant near-death experiences except that Jack couldn’t die. And then there was the Captain’s propensity to flirt, which Sam had started to slowly acclimate to.

It wasn’t the flirting in general that first threw Sam off-guard, so much as when it was directed at him. At first he ignored it. Jack flirted with everybody, and Sam quickly learned that innuendos and dirty jokes were a part of Jack’s larger-than-life personality. It was like an invitation he extended to everybody, and if they didn't accept, that was fine, he would move on and extend the invitation to someone else. So when a licentious grin and a wink were thrown his direction Sam just smiled and went with it, eventually he got so used it that sometimes he’d joke back which never ceased to amuse the Captain.

Jack wasn’t ashamed of what he was (bisexual, maybe, Sam thought) or what he liked and Sam couldn’t deny that despite certain reservations, they had a mutual fondness for each other and it made Sam curious: how did Jack really think of him? Was it a brotherly affection, since they had both lost their other halves, or was it more like a workplace romance? He tried to decipher Jack's expressions, his smiles, his jokes, but everytime Sam thought he recognized the faintest flame of lust Jack would smother it, because as warm as Jack could be, he could also be intensly cold and withdrawn. Eventually Sam stopped trying to figure him out altogether; he was happy enough to have some non-demon company for once, he didn't want to fuck it up.

~~

After a month on the road together Sam agreed Jack was ready to hunt the green eyed demon and so they began the drive back to Montana to retrace their steps. They drove for twelve hours through the night on an open stretch of lonely road that looked the same now as it had three hours back.

“I think we might have to pull over,” Sam suggested, eyes heavy with sleep. “I haven’t seen an exit in miles and the next town isn’t for another few hours.”

“You mean we’re going camping?” Jack’s eyes lit up and Sam couldn’t figure out the appeal of two grown men sleeping in a cramped car.

“You could call it that...”

“Humans are the only species in existence that camp,” Jack explained with a delighted grin. “Not enough people celebrate their own uniqueness.”

“Yeah well I don’t plan on celebrating, I just plan on sleeping,” Sam grumbled.

He pulled over onto a wide, flat field and parked the Impala about 30 feet back from the road. The horizon stretched before them, dark, bare and empty as the road curved over a hill and then disappeared. There were miles of nothing everywhere, as if the world had literally been flattened.

Jack was the first to swing open the door and stretch his legs while Sam shut off the Impala’s engines and pocketed the keys. Without her running the silence was suddenly loud and Sam was startled when his phone suddenly rang. He had kept it charged out of habit but no one had called him in over a month so when he saw the unlisted number he knew it was Ruby and his stomach churned. Sam had said he was only going on one hunt with Jack but if he was being honest with himself he had always intended on bringing Jack with him to fight the green-eyed demon. Sam let it ring a few more times before ignoring the call.

Another car passed them by when Sam got out, its headlights illuminating the grass at their feet, burning hot and bright until it passed by and quickly faded into the distance. Jack was standing, staring at the stars with the same contemplative look he’d had the day they left Montana. Out here in the empty fields where there was no one else but them, the universe stretched above their heads, huge and expansive but also horribly intimate. When Sam stood by Jack’s side, the Captain pointed to some distant star.

“Three trillion light years in that direction there’s a planet almost entirely covered in water. You’d think it would be a blue planet but its populations of algae color it green, purple, and blue. And when both of its suns rise the whole planet turns gold.” Jack smiled nostalgically and Sam tried to imagine the picture the Captain had painted. “But if you go in that direction you’ll find Kataa Floko, a tropical planet with diamond coral reefs. And in that neighboring galaxy is Tersurus, where the inhabitants communicate strictly by ‘gastric emissions’. Sort of a tragic story when they finally discovered fire… ”

“What about there?” Sam pointed in some random direction.

“Metazula Beta,” Jack answered. “The universe’s number one producer of plastic chairs.”

Sam looked disappointed and Jack laughed. The existence of extraterrestrial life was still a new revelation to the Winchester brother and though he loved to hear Jack talk of life outside of Earth, he hadn’t yet decided if it comforted him or made him feel isolated.

“What’s it like out there?” Sam finally asked, scanning the sky as if it could open up and steal him away from his life and his troubles.

“It’s beautiful,” Jack admitted. “The life that’s out there Sam, spinning about our heads and going on about its mad business while we sleep. Did you know there’s planets covered in silver, forests made of jasmine, people made of trees—“

Sam laughed, but not because he didn’t believe him. He looked to the Captain, watching him study the sky with a grin on his face. “But then why stay here, Jack, if you could just…go?”

“I did,” he whispered. “I ran…but everyplace I went just reminded me of Earth, the things I’d seen, and the people I met.”

“The tree people?” Sam teased.

“No,” Jack countered suddenly. He turned to Sam, intent on having himself understood. “I mean the people here. People like you…” The Captain was suddenly so candid, so raw and open that Sam was thankful when he finally diverted his eyes and continued.  “Maybe I could be someone else out there at the edge of the galaxy but at some point I knew if I lived my life here until the planet was finally consumed by the sun and I would never, once, regret it.” The Captain sighed and sat down on the grassy field, exhausted by his own admission.

After a few minutes Sam joined him, idly pulling at the grass tucked under his feet. “So after we hunt this green eyed demon…what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Jack admitted with a smirk. “But I’ve been thinking….I could get used to this.”

Sam smiled up at the twinkling stars above his head. To Jack each point of light was like a mark on a map, indicating some location out there in the distance, out there somewhere Sam could never imagine. Despite his newfound knowledge of aliens, the sky wasn’t a temptation to escape. He knew Venus was the second planet from the sun, that it was shrouded in clouds of sulfuric acid and that it was the brightest star in the sky. It reminded him of a lonely night when he was a kid, waiting for his dad to return from a hunt. He didn’t come home that night but Dean had scrounged up some hot pockets and they sat outside feasting like they were kings and he saw Venus in the sky burning like an icon of hope. He remembers seeing Virgo the night before Jessica died and Gemini after Sam learned Dean had sold his soul to bring him back from the dead.

To him the night sky was a map, not to places he could go but to places he’d been, like a constellation of memories and to Sam that was enough. Maybe this was Jack’s way of admitting it was finally enough for him too.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed, finally deciding that the existence of extraterrestrials was a good thing. A universe teaming with, and fighting for life just like him was a strong symbol of hope. “I’d like that.”


	8. Long, Long Way From Home

**Cardiff, United Kingdom 1899**

Jack was knee deep in the polluted waters of Tiger Bay with the insipid voice of Alice Guppy buzzing in his ears.

“What sort of name is _Captain Jack_ anyway?”

“It’s _my_ name,” Jack said, his back to her, bent over and skimming the shallows.

The shore was made of rocks, smoothed over by ages in the water but still rugged against Jack’s feet, calloused and freezing in the morning’s tide. Finding nothing for the hundredth time, the Captain grunted and pulled his hands out of the water, shaking them in Alice’s general direction, hoping it would stop her strand of annoying questions. This was tedious work and they had been out here for hours already. But Alice was immune to his juvenile revenge, ten feet away on dry land and under the protective gaze of Emily Holroyd. He considered something more drastic, maybe splashing her or chasing her with a strand of seaweed but Emily was glaring at him in a silent challenge so Jack forfeited his plans and went back to searching in the shallows.

Torchwood had been assembled at the docks of Tiger Bay, Cardiff’s major port, to search for something that had fallen through The Rift. A boom town in the Industrial Revolution, Cardiff was also smack dab on a hole in time and space where extraterrestrial life forms and extratemporal artifacts sometimes “washed ashore.” Today they were _literally_ searching the shores of Cardiff’s Inner Bay for something that was giving off a strange signal: a strong electromagnetic pulse that Emily was able to read with an accurate, if not somewhat clunky device.

Emily Holroyd was the current leader of Torchwood Cardiff and had ordered him and Charles Gaskill to comb the shores while she and Alice stood by to monitor the readings. It made sense for them to drag Charles along, he was the newest member of Torchwood and he probably needed some breaking in, but Jack was bitter that they had blackmailed him into this too. After all he _wasn’t_ a member of theirs, not officially anyway.

Jack’s obligation to the Torchwood Institute was tentative at best. Emily and Alice had tracked him down about a year ago and offered him a job, using his own immortality as leverage against him: either he was their ally or he was a threat, and they _eliminated_ threats. Seeing no choice for himself, he agreed to work with them and though they paid well he wasn’t about to forgive the two for manipulating him into an allegiance. He wasn’t a member of Torchwood, so much as an indentured servant dredging up shit from the Bay while Alice and Emily stood by comfortably with thick shawls draped over their shoulders.

“What are you Captain of anyway?” Alice continued blithely, despite the cold shudder that crept up Jack’s spine. “You don’t have a _ship_ , or a _crew_. If anything _I’m_ your Captain, and Emily is your General.”

Alice Guppy was a cheeky little git. As Emily Holroyd’s lover, she had complete immunity from anyone else’s scorn and frequently used that to her advantage. She was orphaned as a child and that had made her witty, and clever, but it also made her cruel. She had a calloused shoot-first-interrogate-later attitude, but since Torchwood executed 100% of its prisoners anyway, it didn’t seem to matter. When there wasn’t an alien to kill, however, she focused on Jack, mocking him or sometimes flirting with him. She always reminded him of his forced allegiance, and that’s what her flirting was too: reinforcement for her own sense of power.

 “Were you in a war? Did you have to kill for that title?” Alice was curling a lock of hair around her finger, bored and idly studying the device in Emily’s hand. “You seem to care so much when _we_ kill…”

“That’s quite enough of that Alice, thank you.” Emily was uninterested in moral discussions, especially when there was a job to do.

As the leader and eldest member of Torchwood Cardiff, Emily Holroyd was less of a mother figure and more of a hard-nosed matron. She was level-headed but with a severe sense of law-and-order that the entropy of the universe had difficulty fitting in to. It didn’t surprise Jack that she was attracted to Alice’s fiery and spontaneous attitude but while he suspected Alice might _enjoy_ killing aliens, he knew Emily considered their termination the lesser of two evils. Any extraterrestrial entity that made contact with Torchwood had to be contained. There was no way to bring them back home and their only alternative was to spend the rest of their life locked up. Emily Holroyd had decided that sparing them the misery of a lifelong cell was the _kind_ thing to do and she lost no sleep over the decision.

“The signal is getting stronger. I’m positive we’ve tracked it to the right area,” Emily reported.

Charles Gaskell finally spoke up, his patience stretched tight and about to snap.  “What are we even looking for, exactly?”

Like most members of Torchwood Charles was absolutely gorgeous, with dark ebony skin, bright eyes, and a handsome face but, unfortunately for Jack, disappointingly straight. Charles always took great pains to dress well but today his clothes had been soiled by the oily run off from the multitude of ships that docked there. Jack took it as a personal offense; there was nothing worse than ruining a suit on a good-looking man.

Charles had been a sailor in the Royal Navy aboard the _HMS Atropos_. Well-educated and with a pleasant personality, he could have done anything after his term with the navy had expired, but it was the excitement and danger of Torchwood that he longed for. Of course Jack didn’t think wading through the dirty shallows of Tiger Bay on a Sunday morning was anybody’s idea of excitement.

“Something not from this Earth,” Emily said matter-of-factly, ignoring the bitter complaint woven into Charles’ question.

Jack was considering mutiny but Charles bit back his antagonism and began his search again, well used to tedious work and questionable orders. The difficulty with searching the Bristol Channel, however, was the temperament of the water.  People who came to port stayed as long as it took to load and unload, not a minute more, and spending all morning in these black, fast-swirling waters it was obvious why: they were unpleasant and untenable. That’s why Jack wasn’t concerned when Charles toppled head-first into the bay; he was surprised neither one of them had done so much earlier. He sloshed through the ever-changing eddies and pulled Charles up by his collar.

 “Alright there?”

Charles gasped for air before violently chopping at the Bay around him in terror.  “There’s something in the water!”

“The signal’s getting stronger!” Emily announced, an alarm ringing in their ears.

Charles got to his feet and they both looked around, scanning the water for any signs of life, but nothing but the tide pulled at their ankles and it was impossible to see even their feet just below the surface.

“Did you get a look at it?” Jack asked.

“No, I was too busy _drowning_.”

Jack smirked, but then something caught his eye, directly beside him. Without thinking Jack lunged forward, sinking his hands into the unknown and groping until something swam between his hands. It was fat, like a football, but definitely alive so he clamped down on it with both hands and pulled it from the water. He had captured a giant alien maggot, or at least it looked like a maggot at first glance. With white, translucent skin and a ribbed body stretched over a long elongated mass of pink tissue that looked suspiciously like a brain. Jack wasn’t sure which end was its front, rotating it several times without any real conclusion, staring in childish wonder as the morning light swirled in a rainbow of colors like the surface of a bubble. His awe was cut short by a shrill screech that reverberated inside his skull.

“The signal is off the charts!” Emily cautioned. When she shouted down at them the creature cried again and Jack nearly dropped the slimy bundle in his arms.

“It’s not a signal; it’s a cry for help,” he berated. “But that device of yours is like feedback for this thing. Turn it off!”

When Emily did they were greeted with a much welcome silence, and by now all of Torchwood had surrounded Jack to see what he had found.

“Marvelous,” Charles said breathlessly. “But what is it?”

Jack felt its struggle to escape lessen and he pulled back to study it closer, discovering what he assumed to be a pair of gills on its left and right sides, the only opening he could find. “It’s amphibious,” he concluded. “Which means it’s going to need water.”

“You are not to release that thing back into the Bay,” Emily warned. “It’s the property of Torchwood now."

Alice had her hands on her hips, staring at the creature from another world as if she expected it to do a trick for her. “It’s Bay water. Nothing can survive drinking _tha_ t for long.”

“Wait a minute.” Charles shrugged the preliminary damp suit coat off his shoulder and dunked it into the water about his feet. Summarily drenched, he held it out for Jack, who transferred the alien to him. Charles wrapped it tight and held the thing against his chest like a child in swaddling clothes. “Marvelous,” he repeated.

Jack nodded in satisfaction. “It’ll do, until we can find a better place for it to go.”

~~~

Emily demanded an immediate meeting back at Torchwood to discuss the new discovery. A large, glass fish tank with brass trim had been procured and once it had been filled with water they placed the alien inside. It bobbed at the surface and then sank directly to the bottom where it sat, quite contentedly, emitting a soft bioluminescent glow that picked up the faded yellow print of the wallpaper and made the whole room glitter.

Without being told to they sat around the tank and simultaneously all turned to stare at Jack expectantly.

“… _What_?”

“Well, go on,” Charles urged. “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”

Jack huffed and crossed his arms, thrilled to know that if he wasn’t being used as cheap labor at least he could be their cliff notes to the universe. “I’ve never seen one before,” he admitted, “but I’ve read about it in a vacation brochure for this planet covered entirely in water. It’s called a _Sententia_ and I think it’s supposed to be an _empath_.”

“A wot?” Alice blurted out in a shrill Welsh accent.

“It means you can experience someone else’s emotions,” Emily explained, nodding at Jack to continue.

“In its natural environment it creates a mental bond with another of its kind, that’s sort of how it mates. In lieu of that they have been known to create connections with other species and some people would dive below the surface trying to see if it would, you know, do that with them. It’s only supposed to affect your positive emotions so I’ve heard the experience described as… _euphoric_.”

Alice was completely unimpressed. “You mean to tell me humans from the future dive into ocean planets looking for a fish to get them high?”

“People go diving for sharks _now,_ ” Jack countered. “It’s a thrill: the same thing.”

“I don’t go diving for sharks,” Alice corrected. “I don’t feel sorry for the bastard that gets bit while doing it either.”

“That as it may be,” Emily sighed, “it’s here with us now and something must be done with it.”

“Put it back in the ocean,” Jack urged but Emily stared his suggestion down.

“Out of the question, you know our motto: if it’s alien—“

“ _It’s ours_. Yeah I know.” Jack crossed his arms sullenly, staring at a wall and briefly daydreaming about finally leaving this rotten place, maybe diving into an ocean covered planet or swimming with three-headed sharks.

“Why can’t we just keep it,” Charles suggested, gesturing to its tank. “Assuming glowing means it’s happy, then what’s the harm?”

“Because it’s dangerous,” Jack concluded, back to reality once again. “That mental connection is supposed to be euphoric for about _five minutes_. I don’t know what happens to someone long term.”

Alice smirked and brushed some hair behind her ear. “They die giggling.”

“Then no one will, what do you call it, ‘connect’ with it?” Charles said. “It’ll be fine.”

Jack shook his head slowly. “No, because that glowing you referred to means it already _has_.”

At this revelation Torchwood Cardiff became queerly silent, each member glancing at the others in distrust, the alien’s unnatural glow casting them all in a strange, suspicious light.

Emily Holroyd was the first to remind them of their Institute’s policy. “An unsolicited _connection_ with a Torchwood member is strictly prohibited. I’m starting to consider this _Sententia_ to be a threat.”

“You didn’t even know it could do that an hour ago,” Jack said sourly. “How can it be prohibited?”

“Well it’s prohibited now!” She insisted, and might have preferred a gavel in her hand to dismiss any further doubts.

Jack leaned forward in his chair, trying to find some kind of loophole in the leader’s rulebook. “Threat or not you can’t _eliminate_ it. This isn’t just a parlor trick; it’s a kind of symbiosis. If you kill it I can’t guarantee the safety of the other person.”

“Maybe it’s connected to _you_ ,” Alice suggested, because obviously it didn’t matter if _he_ died.

“It’s _not_. It can’t access my thoughts or memories unless I _want_ it to. _I’ve had training_.” Jack cocked his lips into a vain smile.

Alice smiled back. “I’ve heard _not enough training._ ” Jack’s ego flickered momentarily and Alice accepted the easy victory.

Emily cleared her throat, debating whether or not to toss the both of them out while the adults tried to figure out their problems. “How are we to determine which of us it’s connected to?”

“I can monitor each of you individually,” Jack suggested, still glaring at Alice who was making a series of faces at him. “If I measure its neural oscillations I can determine which of you it has the most connection to. And from there- ”

“ _We_ shall decide what to do,” Emily finished. She was made of flesh and bones draped in wool and leather but she was a solid pillar between Alice and Charles, holding up the tenets of Torchwood. Moments like these Jack was reminded that he was only a part of this team in a loose capacity, and the knowledge didn’t give him any pleasure. He nodded at her directive and they disbanded so Jack could conduct his tests.

The first person the Captain interviewed was Emily Holroyd.

The Sententia sat in its tank on Emily’s desk during the process and she sat behind it, in her usual plush office chair as if reminding the alien who was in charge. She observed Jack quietly as he flipped open his manipulator and altered the settings of the device to provide read outs on the neural oscillations emitted by the Sententia.

“You’ve been very adept during this mission,” she said, sounding dangerously like approval. “Is your aversion to our organization finally waning?”

Jack laughed. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly. I just think this thing is innocent.”

“I see,” she paused, staring into the alien’s tank. “And your primary concern is with the Sententia? Because mine is with the _human_ that is affected by this; they are also innocent.”

Jack stopped meddling with his device, frowning. “I didn’t mean to imply I _didn’t_ care.”

For all of the woman’s usual indifference to him, she smiled kindly on him now. “I know, because it is not your _job_ to look after those two, it’s mine. Priorities change when you are no longer looking out for yourself but I imagine you have a great capacity to care for a team of your own, and when that day comes you may make a fine leader.”

The prediction wrapped around the Captain like a heavy blanket: warm but suffocating. Jack still thought of himself as a drifter. He only ever thought of leaving this planet behind, but the truth was he knew his Doctor wasn’t going to come for a very long time. Jack was doomed to wait, but the longer he waited the more involved in humanity he got. Emily might be right, maybe someday he would be running a team of his own but then, when that day came, would he ever want to leave?

Jack shuddered at the thought. He couldn’t imagine himself choosing to stay here, so he ignored the prediction and focused on the task at hand: asking Emily to recount her happiest memory. He anticipated that the serotonin levels from her memory would amplify the connection. If there was one between her and the Sententia, he would see a spike on his manipulator.

Emily Holroyd recounted the day she became the head of Torchwood Cardiff, which started with the burning of another Torchwood employee who had started to transform into an alien queen. The next day she recruited Alice Guppy and said it filled her with pride and a terrible sense of responsibility.

Jack noticed the readouts on his manipulator were level. “I said _happiest_ memory.”

“That _is_ my happiest memory,” Emily asserted. “The founding of Torchwood in Cardiff was like bearing a child. The pain of my loss, coupled with the joy of a new beginning, and my fierce sense of protection for the good that we do. It’s everything Jack, all bundled into one, but it is most certainly my _happiest_ memory.”

Jack shrugged. To him, happiness was a crazy night out or a great fuck but if happiness to Emily Holroyd was burning people and then metaphorically giving birth then he wasn’t going to argue with her.  “Alright. You’re clean. I’ll talk to Alice next.”

Emily rose, silent and still. He saw fear for her lover etched in the wrinkles around her eyes but she said nothing and moments later Alice Guppy was sitting before him with her arms crossed.

“You had better not take advantage of me, all alone like this,” she warned with a cheeky grin. “But I might say you did anyway to see what punishment Emily suggests.”

Jack ignored her, instructing the employee to explain her happiest memory to him, but when Alice’s lips curved into a dirty smile he added “keep it clean” and it almost hurt him to do so.

She told him of the day Emily had asked her to join Torchwood. As an orphan, she said, you had two life choices: earn an honest living by slaving away at menial work for scraps, or risk your life as a fingersmith.  Alice (to no one’s surprise) had chosen to be a thief and had been confronted one day by a Miss Emily Holroyd, who spotted her pick-pocketing an elderly gentleman, get caught, and then talk her way out of it. Emily called her a “clever girl” and offered her a job. Alice offered her something more and apparently they’ve gotten along just fine since then.

 “You’re clean,” Jack declared, and just as he saw Alice about to go into great detail about what ‘getting along’ meant, he cut her off. “And I want my _wallet_ back.”

He raised a brow expectantly. The former thief batted her eyes playfully, placed her left foot on the edge of his chair, between his legs, and hitched up her skirt. She had a special strap about her thigh where she kept a gun and whatever poke she had managed to swipe, since old habits die hard. She picked it out and handed it to him smugly. Jack held it between his thumb and index finger as if it was infected and dismissed her.

The last person he interviewed was Charles Gaskell, who had cleaned himself up from that morning’s incident and sat in front of him now in a white-pressed shirt with a checkered cravat delicately tied around his throat and framed by a tailored pinstriped suit coat. He sat completely straight, his hands pressed together tightly though his thumbs wiggled nervously. He assumed Jack was going to ask him some impossible task and, failing that, either execute or banish him from Torchwood. When Jack asked him to recount his happiest memory though, he relaxed just a little.

He told Jack of a time when he was younger and poorer, a time when he had taken up sailing because immigrants like him didn’t have many options. He recounted how desperate he was to be good at the job but that sailing out on the open sea hadn’t agreed with him at first. The sailors had nicknamed him “Charles the Choke” because he had been known to choke during combat.

During the first part of this memory Jack glanced at his watch impatiently, wondering if anybody in this organization knew what the definition of _happy_ really was. But Charles continued, explaining that one day during a particular campaign his hesitation had ended up, coincidentally, saving them; after they had disabled the enemy ship their Captain had called out _specifically_ to him “handsomely done Charles”. From then on every seaman called him “handsome Charles”. They forgot that he had ever choked and in response he never did again.

Jack glanced between the sailor and his manipulator. “Do you feel any different?”

“I’m nervous,” he admitted. “You haven’t looked me in the eye since I started talking.”

Jack made sure to lock eyes with him now. “Because the neural readouts have been skyrocketing this whole time. I’m sorry Charles, but I think it’s connected to _you_.”

“I knew it,” Charles moaned, putting a hand over his mouth. “Ever since I wrapped my coat around that bloody thing I’ve...I don’t know how to explain it.”

“So you _do_ feel differently?” Jack concluded.

“When I held it in my arms, it was like I was me holding this thing but I was also something else looking up at me. I could feel my own wonder _reflected, amplified_. It was…out there, Jack. Not _euphoric_ in the least, I assure you. Even now I feel like I can see the back of my own head.” Charles turned to stare at the Sententia sitting quietly at the bottom of the tank. “Like I’m not my own person anymore, I’m me and _something else_.”

Jack closed his manipulator. “I know you didn’t want this Charles, but it doesn’t have to be a _bad_ thing. You’ve made contact with another species in a way that a lot of people never get to experience.”

Charles turned back to Jack, silently pleading. “You’re _sure_ there’s no way to sever it? This connection?”

“Not with anything we have now. But the good news is I think you’ll be fine.”

The Captain invited the first two members of Torchwood back into the office and shared his discovery. Emily Holroyd was not satisfied with his results and ordered her own, much more thorough investigation but by the end of it she had learned nothing except that dropping a bar of soap into the alien’s tank made Charles itch. They concluded the Sententia was not a threat, but it was Charles’ responsibility to look after it and watch it carefully. If he gained any important knowledge about where it came from or what it wanted he was to report it directly to her. But the Sententia only shared emotions, and the newest member of Torchwood never learned anything else about the creature that shared this otherwise intimate bond with him.

Eventually he got used to the feeling of being in two places at once and every so often Alice and Emily would be amazed that Charles knew when they were in the office, and exactly what they were doing (in fact Alice quite enjoyed the idea of two people watching her and Emily be naughty, so for about a month Charles was really quite miserable, but eventually the appeal wore off and everything went back to normal). The alien, too, seemed content with its new home.  It cleaned its own tank and never needed to be fed. As a result Torchwood nearly forgot about it. It sat inside its tank on a table inside Emily’s office, first as a stranger and then as a pretty decoration. As the years passed it became so commonplace that it blended into the background completely, where it sat undisturbed, silently glowing in peace.

By 1914 the Great War had broken out and Captain Jack temporarily left Torchwood and enlisted in the Allied army. In 1916 Jack was fighting in the trenches when Charles Gaskell died. The former sailor had been chasing after a Weevil in the downtrodden parts of town near Tiger Bay, when a citizen who was frightened of what they had seen, and also assuming Charles to be a spy, unceremoniously shot him in the back of the head. Torchwood later recovered the Weevil but never discovered who shot one of their best men. As was custom by then they froze Charles’ body (having reverse-engineered the technology from a Sontaraan ship that crashed in 1913). His things were collected and stored off-site as if he had never existed.

On that day, in 1916, the Sententia had also stopped glowing. Emily saw it first, and that’s when she knew something had happened to Charles. They observed the Sententia for a period of time but they concluded it to be dead, cut off after Charles had been shot. By now they considered it to be less of an alien and more a part of Charles and therefore, in respect to him, they placed the brass-lined tank with the rest of his belongings.

Unbeknownst to Torchwood, however, the Sententia did not die; instead, it _remembered._ Because what the brochure did not tell Jack or any other tourists to that planet was that the Sententia had developed mental connections not only as a means to mate but also as a defense mechanism. If something killed its mate it would remember, and the cells in its body would remember, and over the course of its evolutionary period it would engineer a defense so that it, and its future kindred, would not fall prey to the same enemy. Torchwood didn’t know who killed Charles and neither did the Sententia but it imagined what could have and what it would do to them. The thought of revenge was a poison until after nearly 100 years, alone in the dark, it finally became one.

In 2009 Torchwood Cardiff’s underground Hub was destroyed by operatives within the British government trying to protect themselves from the knowledge of their past encounters with the 456. Before she took her post in New York, General Erisa led a team of UNIT soldiers to pick through its remains like a vulture. Away from the original blast site they found several hundred storage lockers containing the possessions of long deceased Torchwood members, including Charles Gaskill, and inside his locker they found a small alien waiting for an excuse to kill. 


	9. The Promised Land

The Impala cut through the last remaining minutes of twilight, streaking down the black highway. There was a heavy threat of rain in the east and when the sun started to crawl over Montana’s border it bathed Sam and Jack in blood-red light.

They had returned to begin their search for the green-eyed demon and their first stop was the County Hospital. They had escaped this place one month ago, and now they were back. Sam was afraid he would be arrested again and Jack was looking over his shoulder for a tail, but every shred of evidence they left behind had been erased. The tenth story window of the hospital had been replaced and the floor where Sam had been held prisoner was remodeled. No one remembered the incident in question because everyone working on that day had been fired or transferred in what was described as a “massive budget cut”, and according to hospital records Susan Boyd had not been admitted here. She did not die on their operating table because no one of that name had ever _existed_.

Any attempt at further information was barred by the hospital’s president who explained he was legally bound to silence regarding, well, everything. So they turned to the police. As with Susan, there was no record of the gaurd who had been possessed that day. There was, however, a police report that had been sealed. With some clever lies they convinced the sheriff to let them break the seal on the manila envelope and inside Sam and Jack found a disturbing series of photographs along with a report of vandalism. It revealed that on the same day Susan had not-died, and in the same room that Susan had not-died in, someone had written HANDSOMELY DONE JACK on the wall in blood.

“Does that mean anything to you?” Sam asked, spinning the photo for the Captain to see and handing it across the table in the gray interrogation room where they had been left alone.

Jack took the evidence and studied it carefully. Shaking his head he tossed the photograph back to Sam. “No.”

“It looks like a  message for you. Do you think it was green-eyes?”

“Who else could it be?”

“The statements in here say it was written in the blood of a woman and, get this, they name her: Susan Boyd.” Sam cocked his head and continued thumbing through the report. “Someone went out of their way to cover all this up.”

“UNIT,” Jack concluded, and the name bounced off the walls around them, reverberating loudly in their ears.

Sam looked up like someone had shot a gun. “Could they still be looking for you?”

“Of course they are. I broke our contract, got one of their officers killed.” Jack shrugged and uncrossed his arms, leaning forward on the table with a self-incriminating smile. “Plus I’m not the kind of man that just disappears and lives out the rest of his life in the wilderness.”

Sam smirked but only for a second. He crammed the photographs and the report back into its envelope, sparing Jack a concerned glance. “You shouldn’t blame yourself for her death.”

But his counsel fell on deaf ears. Jack stood and his chair jerked noisily across the floor. “Where to from here?”

Sam frowned, rolled his eyes, but didn’t resist the change in subject. “Let’s start looking for Omens.”

In a shabby motel on the dangerous side of town they sat and scoured the last month’s papers looking for clues and turned up nothing. There were no signs of the supernatural anywhere in the state and that, in Sam’s experience, had _never_ happened. The only thing they managed to dig up were some electrical storms in its capitol, Helena.  It was a shot in the dark, but since it was their only lead the pair packed up and drove out.

The first two days were fruitless, but on the third a burglary at the Military Museum caught their eye. Sam and Jack interviewed the director and were told a print had been vandalized and a 12lb carronade had been stolen. The print was of HA Ogden Werner’s US Naval Uniforms. The director showed it to them and pointed out that the second class petty officer had been colored in with a black sharpie. The director then muttered something just as discolored and put the print back into storage.

The carronade, a short cast-iron cannon, was a bit trickier to explain. The museum had acquired it from a foreign vessel and since it wasn’t specifically American they had just kept it outside as a general example of what was used in that era. What baffled the director, however, was that someone had stolen it in the first place. Even if they could drive up and tow it off in the middle of the night without anyone noticing, he explained, the museum had bolted the cannon to a block of cement. It was humanly impossible for anyone to steal it from under their noses but someone had just the same.

At the end of the interview Sam concluded this trip had been a complete waste of time. Even if there was something weird in this town they couldn’t say for certain it was demonic. If the museum had been a disappointment to Sam, it was a complete disaster for Jack. Ever since they had started interviewing the director Jack had become increasingly agitated, refusing to talk to Sam on the way home and bitterly cutting down any suggestions Sam had to continue their investigation elsewhere.

Jack said all they needed was some rest and Sam ignored him, staying up late into the night researching other leads until he finally crashed at 6 am. When he woke up again Jack was gone, and so was the Impala.

~~~

It was raining again, like it had been all week. Jack pulled up the collar of his jean jacket, not that it did much to protect him from the cold. It was times like these that he missed his greatcoat, it had been a shield for him for so many years Jack never could shake the feeling of being naked without it.

Convinced his ambition to rebuild Torchwood would be inevitably delayed, Jack had chosen to try on a different uniform. After the 456 he had wondered if he could ever take up his position again, on earth and leading Torchwood, but what else was an immortal man like him cut out to do? That's when Jack had happily stumbled across Sam Winchester: this odd little kid and his “family business”. Turns out that hunting wasn’t all _that_ different from his old job: no hub, less tech, and more spells, but the mortality rate was essentially the same. It was the travelling that appealed to him the most, though. In a smaller capacity it reminded him of traveling with the Doctor: the absolute freedom of the open highway, always someplace new to go, something new to see, and because of it he'd fallen in love with the Earth all over again.

Even Sam had started to grow on the Captain. The kid was in desperate need of a haircut but Sam was also brilliant: technologically savy and quick on his feet with a natural curiosity that delighted Jack. He would eat up every story the Captain told and smile in a slow, thoughtful way that lit up his whole face. Plus he was hot, not that the kid realized it. Any other man as tall, fit, and handsome as this hunter was would've walked the earth with a cocky swagger, but not Sam Winchester; Sam was too convinced there was something wrong with him. 

When Sam revealed he was part human, part whatever, it was inconsequential to Jack because he'd already seen (and slept with) half-humans, meta humans, and everything inbetween. He accepted that what had happened to Sam was against his will, but Jack refused to believe it made the kid 'wrong' or 'evil' or any of the other terms people used when they don't understand something. He saw that Sam genuinely cared about the people they helped: the hunter was hesitant to shoot something just because it wasn’t human, and when they failed to save somebody Jack always saw how it tore him up on the inside. Not that Sam was some shining example of purity. The kid had an innate innocence but years of hunting and other tragic horrors that Jack could only guess at, had cultured an equally innate darkness. But no matter what Sam thought about himself, the Captain knew he was a good person, and you don’t have to travel to the gold-dusted beaches of Laylora to realize how rare that is.

Jack had to finally admit that he liked Sam; he had liked Sam for a while. He felt guilty that he was dissatisfied with their friendly relationship but more than that, he was scared because his attraction had blind-sided him. Ianto's death was still a heavy weight on his heart, he was too raw, so he denied himself the reckless pursuit of some demon-hunting college boy from Kansas, just as he'd denied himself that date with the coroner. He had no desire to repeat the pain of his past.

But out here in the dark and in the rain, miles away from town, Jack’s past had finally caught up with him. He wasn’t here facing it as Captain Jack Harkness, leader of Torchwood, but simply as Jack. For a month he had no longer been an alien hunter, but a demon hunter and now he was at a crossroads. Jack knew that very soon he would have to make a choice about who he wanted to be.

Unbeknownst to Sam, Jack recognized the clues left for him by the green-eyed demon. At first the phrase 'handsomely done' had meant nothing but when they visited the museum in Helena he found the desecrated print had been made in 1899, and the ship that the carronade had come from was the _HMS Atropos_. That's when the memories had started to flood back.

Lightening flashed, and a peal of thunder tore open the sky.  Jack heard someone shout his name but the rain was deafening.

Once he knew the demon’s name Jack had discovered a summoning ritual in Sam’s journal. He drove out to a deserted location, bringing the Impala with him as insurance. If something did happen to him he knew Sam wouldn’t rest until the car was back in possession. And maybe in pursuit of his car he might find out what happened to Jack. So in a rickety shack with rusted farm equipment Jack had drawn a circle on the floor, offered his blood, and summoned the demon. A full minute ticked by until he heard his name, another minute and Jack thought he was imagining this all, but then through the open door of the shed and through the thick carpet of rain he saw two bright green eyes.

Jack stared intently into the dark, trying to make out the figure that was approaching. Blood still ran down his forearm from the incision he’d made, but he knew it would heal in a matter of minutes so he stood tall to meet whatever wicked thing was coming for him. “I know who you are now,” Jack called out, his voice small and weak as the rain beat down on the roof. “You wanted me to figure it out? Well here I am.”

The eyes disappeared and then, like a shadow, the demon stepped inside the small shack and Jack was face to face with the thing he had spent a month preparing for.

“ _Charles_.”

“In the flesh,” it said, chuckling darkly at its own joke.

The host Charles had chosen was a black, broad-shouldered man with a shaved head. He wore a well-fitted pinstriped suit but his face was heavily pockmarked, as if he’d already been to hell and back. Jack shuddered to think the man had been chosen to send  him that exact message.

“ _I don’t understand_.”

The demon blinked and its luminescent green eyes gave way to simple, dark pupils. “I know. As it turns out, you’re not the only immortal.”

He took a step forward and Jack backed away. A pair of hooks had been threaded through the ceiling and they hung from the rafters on a thick chain. They tapped harmlessly against Jack’s shoulder, the impact shuddering up the length of the chain. “What does that mean?”

“It means life goes on. In a cruel, sick, way it goes on.”

“But like this?" Jack wondered. "You were a _good man_.”

“I was _half_ a good man,” Charles corrected. “The other half was left to rot in a tank.”

Jack shook his head. “What—”

“That _thing_ ,” it snarled. “That thing found me, Jack, in the darkness. It couldn’t let me go, even in death! I was supposed to be at peace and it made me suffer with its grief and its hate – _the hate Jack._ It _burned_ at me, eating away at me and my hope until _I became this.”_

Jack was stunned. He had forgotten about the Sententia a decade ago but he remembered his impulse to protect it from what he thought was a naïve, murderous Institute. He was horrified to see the results of his choice.

“And when I finally broke free,” Charles continued, “I wanted to find you. So I could _thank you_.”

Jack didn’t realize how much danger he was in until Charles had his hand around his throat, the Captain’s feet dangling in the air. Jack knew he had some holy water in his back pocket and a rosary tucked under his collar but all he could do was stare guiltily into those green eyes.

“Charles…let me help you. Whatever’s happened to you, I want to help.”

“I don’t want your brand of help,” it snarled. “I just want you to know how _I suffered_.”

Jack felt Charles’s fingers close like a vice around his throat. He tried to plead with him but it turned into nothing but strangled gasps. Ironically he remembered Charles’s original nickname aboard the HMS:  Charles the Choke.

Hanging in the air Jack felt the chains from the ceiling tap coldly against his cheek. He had started to reach for the flask in his pocket when he felt one of the hooks press into his back. Jack began to struggle violently, but every inch of his body exploded in white hot pain as Charles jammed the hook through his spinal cord and left him there, twitching and gaping like a fish.

~~~

Sam was pissed. For the last twenty-four hours Jack had been a distant, self-absorbed, prick. He was willing to forgive Jack’s attitude, his perpetual silence, and even gave him enough space to sulk for the night, but stealing his car was the last straw. It wasn’t just any car, it was _Dean’s_ car and Sam had been charged with its care. Jack knew that, and he never drove it without him. So what suddenly possessed him to take it for a joyride while he was sleeping?

It occurred to Sam that Jack could have up and left. He thought he’d grown to know Jack over the past month, at least enough to assume they enjoyed each other’s company. But what did Sam _really_ know about Captain Jack Harkness?

He knew that Jack was good with guns. He knew that Jack was clever and quick on his feet. He knew that Jack said ten things he didn’t believe for every one thing he almost believed. Sam _thought_  the Captain had worked for UNIT but apparently he didn’t. Jack said he worked for something else, but he never said who, or what. Jack was just a stranger that had dropped out of the sky with a charming smile and an unprecedented knowledge of the paranormal. It bothered Sam to think he was that easy to win over but he could brood over his perpetually poor choices in friends later, right now he wanted Dean's car back.

No matter Jack’s intentions, Sam knew he could track the Impala with ease; he’d left his cellphone in the backseat. Pulling up the gps on his laptop Sam pinpointed its location: 20 miles outside of town. He wasted no time in “borrowing” a car from the motel parking lot and drove out to the last location the gps had pointed to.

It was dark, it was raining, and it was hard to see ten feet in front of him, but eventually Sam found the small dwindling road into the woods that led to a clearing where the Impala sat parked in front of a wooden shed. Cautiously, Sam shut off his headlights and pulled over to the side of the tiny road, just before the clearing. He shut off the car and grabbed a sawed off shotgun, a flashlight, and a flask of holy water. He tucked the gun under his jacket to protect it from the rain and approached the clearing, looking for signs of Jack’s presence.

He peeked inside the Impala’s driver-side window and saw the keys still in the ignition. The headlights were on, as if Jack had gotten out in a hurry, illuminating nothing but a few sad looking trees. In the backseat Sam confirmed the presence of his cellphone, but there was no sign of Jack. 

Twenty feet away from the Impala there was a flimsy shack, a few pieces of rusted farm equipment sitting outside. It was the only other place that Jack might resonably be, unless of course he had decided to play hookey in the surrounding forest, so Sam fingered the trigger of his shotgun and approached with caution.

It was a utility shed with no door, just an opening. Sam leaned against the rotting wood and fumbled with his flashlight; even from here he could smell sulfur and blood. With the light in one hand and the gun in his other, Sam burst into the shed and immediatly gagged. His flashlight lingered eerily over the corpse of Captain Jack Harkness, hanging from the ceiling by a chain.

Sam stumbled to the far wall in order to unwind the chain that held the man, kicking over a bowl of blood as he went. It clattered noisily but Sam ignored it. Seconds later Jack’s body crumpled to the earth like a rag doll.

He threw himself by the Captain’s side, yanking out the hook in his back. To his horror Jack was still breathing, which meant he could have been like this for hours, _alive_. “ _You idiot_ ,” Sam growled, choking back his worried tears. “You tried to summon a demon by yourself?”

Jack’s body was limp, his legs at an unnatural angle from the fall and his breathing was shallow and strained. Sam straightened the man's legs and stripped off his own jacket to prop under Jack’s head.  Staring into the Captain’s glassy eyes, he searched for some spark of life to tell him Jack was going to recover from this.

“It was him wasn’t it? It was green-eyes.” Sam gripped Jack’s shoulder. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, and he was terrified for the Captain. “Why would you do that, Jack? Without me? _God, you’re so stupid_!”

Finally Jack’s eyes began to clear, and his fingers started twitching like an engine churning before it starts. Sam almost laughed in relief but the joy was short lived when the Captain’s hand clutched Sam’s arm and he screamed in agony. The hook had been jammed into Jack's spinal column, separating the vertebrae, and his body was currently, and very painfully, trying to fix the problem. 

Sam heard bones cracking, muscles mending, and the inhuman cries of a man cursed with immortality. It had to be a curse, the Winchester concluded, no one was meant to live through something like this. When the process was done, Jack collapsed back on to the bloodied cement floor with a gasp.

“Where is he?” he asked Sam, already trying to push himself up.

Sam stared at Jack incredulously. “You mean the _demon_ you summoned?”

The Captain stared at him blankly before rolling over and getting to his feet. “Yeah.”

Sam followed suit, grabbing his flashlight as well. “I don’t know,” he said, indignation covering his concern. “Maybe someone _else_ summoned it to the middle of nowhere?”

Jack ignored Sam’s mounting animosity. “No. He saw me die once; he wants to see me die again, and again,  _ad infinitum_.”

Sam pointed the flashlight onto Jack. He could clearly see the healing cut on his arm, the dried blood, the stone cold look on his face. “Jack, what’s going on here?”

The Captain looked up at him with ancient eyes and that’s when Sam realized he'd never known this man at all.

“What’s that?” Jack said, suddenly turning to look at the ground. Sam thought he was simply avoiding him, but Jack dropped to one knee and ran his fingers across the cold floor. “I’ve seen something like this before…in the badlands.”

Sam stepped forward and pointed his flashlight at what had caught his friend's attention. Slathered across Jack’s fingers was a familiar viscous liquid with a distinct green tint.

“It’s him…” Sam marveled. Jack shot him a curious look and Sam tried to explain. “Like, chopped up and liquefied or something. I’ve seen it as well. I was trying to exorcise a demon and then…. _this_ came out of it as if it were _sick_  and then...” Sam trailed off, remembering how Ruby had murdered the demon and the kid it was in before either of them had a chance to see what would happen. But Jack had already stopped listening to him, caught up in thoughts of his own.

“This substance was the after-effect of two deaths. One I was _sent_ to investigate. One that UNIT already knew about." Jack's eyes suddenly dilated. "Sam, don’t you see what this means? UNIT didn’t just know about demons, it knew about the _dead ones too_.”

Sam turned the pale beam of the flashlight back onto Jack. “It also means green-eyes is dying.”

A muted sound from outside the shack drew both of their attention. Sam turned to see that the Impala door was open and someone was trying to crawl inside. He raced to the car and grabbed the stranger by the collar, tossing him out of the vehicle and back into the rain. The man fell with a distressed gurgle and even without the light Sam shined in his face, he could tell it was the green-eyed demon.

It tried to jump and attack Sam but it didn’t even have strength to stand. It just collapsed at his feet, shaking and sweating.

“Charles!” To Sam’s shock, Jack knelt beside the demon and placed his hand gently on the man’s pinstriped back. “It’s okay, I’m here.”

Just like in the badlands, Sam saw the demon heave and regurgitate itself. He stepped back in disgust.

When it was done it pushed itself away from the mess and collapsed. Jack, still beside him, turned the host’s head to him and tenderly wiped the mess from his lips. The demon reached out and tried to wrap its hand around Jack’s throat. Sam could see the bruises he had left on the Captain from his last attack, but it was too weak by now and its arm fell uselessly to the ground.

“Leave me to die alone,” it rasped.

“Not again,” Jack whispered with a tortured smile. “You’re my responsibility now. Remember? Torchwood’s the one job you can never quit….”

“I died once. I thought it was the end. Is _this_ the end?” The light in the demon’s eyes had faded. Remarkably, like a human, its vibrant pupils grew glassy and Sam watched as the light inside of it faded. “Oh god what if this is the end….”

The demon clung to Jack and the Captain reciprocated by gently squeezing his hand.“ _Then you finally get your peace_.”

It lurched out of Jack’s embrace and retched as he’d done before. The host’s body arched painfully with every attempt to purge itself of the thing inside until it finally fell, face-first in the dirt, and stopped moving. Jack checked the man’s pulse, concluded he was gone, and leaned forward to press a kiss to the side of his head.

“Did you know him?” Sam asked, standing by Jack’s side, still trying to process exactly what was going on. The smell of blood and sulfur was overwhelming and he was trying hard not to retch himself.

“Yes,” Jack said brokenly. “He was a good man. Once.”

 “…I’m sorry.”

Now that the heavy rain had lightened to a drizzle Sam pushed back the damp hair that kept clinging to his face. It wasn’t any consolation to him to know the demon had once been a good man; if this is what good men turned into, Sam didn’t think it boded well for him.

He was disappointed with this hunt, if you could call it that. He had thought exorcising the green-eyed demon would have been freeing. Instead, he felt burdened with more questions. “So you think UNIT knows about this virus thing, whatever it is, that seems to be affecting demons?”

Jack laid the remnants of his friend on the muddied ground and slowly got to his feet. It was clear that this ending was just as dissatisfying for him. “I’m certain of it.”

“Do you think they’re behind it?”

“…I don’t know, only one way to find out.” Jack turned to him with a portentous glance. "Come with me."

He didn’t say please but his eyes pleaded nonetheless. It was that phrase, come with me, like it meant something heavy and horrible for Jack to say it. It was an invitation to something other than the tragedy at hand. It was an invitation that scared Sam and so he hesitated. “Why?” 

“You didn’t like it when I left you before. So come with me now.”

Sam cleared his throat. He was surprised by the sentiment but Jack had misinterpreted his question. “No I meant…Why? Some government organization finds out how to kill demons and you want me to be sad about that?” He shrugged, trying too hard to appear indifferent. “I’m not. I’m sorry about your friend, but he was a demon, he’s killed you before, he _tried_ to kill me….” 

“That’s not _the point_.”

“Then what IS the point?” Sam snapped. “Huh? Of doing this? It’s killing demons Jack, it’s sending them _back_ to hell. And if someone found a way to wipe them all out at once then I say great!”

Jack stared at him. “You don’t mean that.”

The hunter scoffed.

“ _Sam_ ,” Jack pressed. “What you’re talking about… that’s genocide.”

Sam grit his teeth. It didn’t seem fair to use a term like that on pure evil, not after they’d murdered his mother, his father, his brother, _Jessica_ , everybody he’d ever cared about. Demons would wipe out humanity if they had the chance. So why bother taking the moral high ground when saving them just meant more death?

Sam stared into Jack’s shining, sanctimonious eyes and clenched his jaw. “I know.”

Jack looked disappointed and it only made Sam angrier but it was late and they already stunk enough of sulfur and blood. There was no point in trying to prove the other wrong, so they buried the green-eyed demon’s last host on the side of the road with a small bundle of flowers and a white cross. Then they drove away. They drove, and they drove, until they were forced pull over from the threat of exhaustion.

The highway had promised them everything but at the end of the road there was just another cheap motel with dirty blankets. They slept for hours but they were still tired, they mended their wounds but they were still broken; because at the end of the road there was no satisfaction, there was no peace, there was only more road.


	10. Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)

Sam was startled awake by things going bump in the night, a noisy clatter like the scraping of metal on metal inside the cheap little motel room that Sam and Jack had collapsed in. His body felt like a brick, but the disturbance had struck his mind with a silent terror, instinctively prompting him to reach for the gun he kept at his bedside.

There was a dark figure on the other side of the room, tall, clad in gray, and digging through his duffle bag of hunting gear. Without thinking Sam pointed the weapon at the intruder, his finger shaking on the trigger. The stranger turned to look at him like something from a bad dream.

“Sam?”

Sam thought he recognized the voice but he wasn’t sure, his faculties were being filtered through a sleep-addled brain, distorting them. Sam squinted into the darkness, rubbing his eyes and pushing hair from his face in order to improve his vision. He stared again and the intruder’s identity suddenly cut itself from the dark room, two bright blue eyes shining out at him. It was only Jack.

“ _Shit_ ,” Sam said, gasping with relief before chuckling at his own absurdity. His arm fell heavily against the bed, releasing the gun. “Sorry,” he apologized. “For a second I thought…” Sam shrugged, still shaky from the sudden resurrection from deep sleep.

“That I’d come to rob you?” Jack smirked, but the humor didn’t disguise his wary expression.

Sam shook his head, thoroughly embarrassed. “Sorry,” he repeated.

“No. I didn’t mean to wake you.”  Turning back to their bag of weapons, the Captain was suddenly more aware of the noise he was making, removing a shotgun and a crowbar but on the hunt for something else.

Sam watched him quietly, unable to dismiss the feeling that there was something _different_ about Jack.

For starters he was wearing the WWII coat Sam had first met him in (plus one sword hole). The hunter remembered how confident Jack had been in that coat, how charming and mysterious it had made him. Now it was draped over his shoulders like a heavy mantel. It was so heavy it weighed the rest of him down, drew wrinkles around his eyes and carved an unnatural frown into his face. For the first time Sam thought Jack didn’t look handsome, he just looked tired.

The Winchester also noticed a leather strap across the Captain’s wrist, the same one he had been tinkering with a month earlier. Jack had told him it was broken but even under the cuff of his wool coat, Sam could see a faint blue light flashing.

Rifling through the bag, Jack was a man on a mission, finally removing a small gun with a long, thin barrel: his original Webly Mark-6. Jack pushed his greatcoat aside and holstered the gun and in an odd way it completed him.

He finally looked like Captain Jack Harkness. But Sam worried the man he had sat under the stars with had transformed into someone else.

He still looked like Jack, just tired and a bit beaten up. Most of his bruises from the confrontation with the green-eyed demon had completley healed except for a cut on his lip. The wound was still visible though it had scabbed over. Jack’s body could heal broken bones in a matter of minutes but minor cuts and bruises always lasted for hours.

Sam also recognized the smile that stretched across the Captain’s face and rarely to his eyes. Jack’s smile was never really _happy._ He joked and it would make him smirk or maybe even laugh but it was all bluster, he was always just pushing back some encroaching sadness. It might have been the first thing Sam noticed about Jack because he recognized it in his brother and he recognized it in himself. It was the after-effect of a life full of sacrifices and memories that never stopped haunting you.

He saw that same sadness in Captain Jack Harkness, but amplified. He _was_ the same man but different, focused, and dangerous. Given what he knew about Jack’s abilities and convictions, Sam thought that even like this, in a dark motel room with peeling wallpaper, the Captain looked a little bit like a hero.

“I wish you were still asleep,” Jack said suddenly and Sam glanced up at him, puzzled. “I’ve been trying to think of a way to say goodbye and I realized…I usually don’t.”

Of course hero worship is unhealthy; nobody knows that better than Sam. “Because you sneak out the backdoor?”

“Sometimes,” Jack admitted coldly. “Other times I don’t get the _chance_.”

There was something else that had changed, just now. Jack’s tone was different. It was charming because Jack was always charming but the man’s innuendos always seemed like cheap, flighty jokes. This wasn’t an innuendo, and it wasn’t a joke.

The Captain began to approach him on the bed, slow and deliberate, and Sam sat waiting for something though he didn’t know what, each of Jack’s footsteps an encrypted invitation.

“But I have a chance _now_.” Jack finally said, lingering over Sam, reaching out and gingerly tracing his fingers across the hunter’s cheek. Sam let out the breath he didn’t realize he had been holding.

 _This is ridiculious_ , Sam thought to himself, _I've got to be dreaming._

Growing up, Dean was Sam’s first guide to ‘getting the ladies’. In his older brother’s worldview there was a clear distinction between your guy friend and your girlfriends. Each had a special place, their role to play, and traveling across the rural Midwest as a kid it wasn’t a tenant that was often challenged. Not until Sam went to college did he learn that his sexual worldview was, well, limited.

He took a course in human sexuality, essentially as a blow off class to gain a few extra credits and lighten his workload, but he'd enjoyed it. He learned about the Kinsey scale, a philosophy regarding human sexuality that states nature is rarely divided into categories but exists, instead, on a continuum. It was a clear departure from Dean’s sheep and goat distinction.

Sam had always thought of Jack as a friend and as a comrade. According to Dean, that’s all it was. But the Captain didn’t really have categories, or even a scale. He tried to see people (or aliens) for who they were and if he liked it, he let them know. It was an entirely different example from the one Sam had known his whole life and it made everything he learned in college seem trite.

So when the Winchester brother felt Jack’s desire trace the outline of his jaw, Sam wasn’t uncomfortable, he was curious. There had been an undeniable tension built between them for the last month, and Sam wouold be lying to himself if he hadn't thought of kissing Jack at least once.

“What were you thinking of, exactly?” He stared up at Jack defiantly. Part of him was still expecting a snarky comment, a cheeky grin, and then for the pressure to suddenly defuse.

But then Jack leaned down to kiss him and Sam quickly confirmed this wasn't still a dream.

It was gentle at first, and Sam didn’t move as he adjusted to the new sensation of Jack’s stubble against his chin. Jack kissed his lower lip and Sam savored his tasted, his smell.  Jack had always smelled subtly and pleasantly of cologne and when Sam tentatively parted his lips for the Captain’s tongue he was surprised to find Jack tasted the same: rich and dark, and just a little sweet.

Jack’s hand slid to the back of his head, fingers twining through Sam’s hair and pulling him into an even deeper kiss and Sam responded. What had started as a curiosity quickly became a hunger. It didn't feel wrong to be kissing another man, not like it was wrong to kiss Ruby, or to sleep with her. It just felt different, and, well, nice. He wasn’t sure what Dean would have said though he could probably guess Dad's thoughts. Not that it mattered because they were both dead and they're martyred sense of morality had died with them. They couldn't tell him that he was wrong to drink demon blood, or that he was wrong to kiss Jack because his decision to make, not theirs. 

Sam blindly reached out for Jack’s coat, pawing at the wool lapels as he opened his mouth wide and pushed his own tongue into Jack. The Captain welcomed the aggression, their teeth clacking together like wine glasses as the kiss suddenly escalated in urgency.

Sam pulled at Jack’s lower lip with his teeth. The cut on the Captain’s mouth reopened and the taste of blood flooded Sam’s senses. His nose flared at the smell of it but like Jack, it was intoxicating. He lapped at the cut, kissed it gently and relished the metallic taste in his mouth. As he did, Sam could feel Jack’s chest rumble in a low, lurid chuckle. That’s when he noticed Jack’s eyes were completely black.

“ _Fuck_!”

Sam rolled off the bed and onto the floor. It was supposed to be a defensive maneuver to put distance between him and whatever demon had crawled into Jack’s head but he botched it, got tangled in the sheets and hit the ground looking like an oversized serving of pigs in a blanket. Struggling to free himself Sam crawled across the motel floor, finally shedding his trappings and scrambling for Ruby’s demon-killing-knife, hidden somewhere within the compartments of his jacket.  

By the time he finally had the knife in his shaking palm and turned to confront it, the demon could have killed him about five times over. Instead it just sat on the bed, staring out at him with Jack’s baby blues and a smug smile on its face.

“You’re out of practice. Good thing I just like watching you sweat.”

Sam’s knuckles went white, clutching at the knife like it was the only thing holding him up. His head was spinning and he felt nauseous as if he were standing on the deck of a boat about to capsize.

“I don’t know what you want,” Sam said, his voice wavering. “But you picked the wrong guy to possess, because I won’t think twice about running this through your heart.”

Jack was unimpressed. “Sam, calm down a little alright? It’s _me_. Less curves then I usually like, and the junk is in front instead of the back, but it’s still _me_.”

As if he’d just woken up again, Sam’s reaction was slow. This time he wasn’t fighting through sleep, he was fighting through shock, and betrayal, and fear. He thought about what demon would be so bold with him, so familiar. He thought about what demon would try and kiss him and then it dawned on Sam.  “… _Ruby_?” He stared at the demon, his stomach twisting itself into a knot. “ _What_ are you doing here?”

“Oh you know, coma girl was starting to feel a little cramped and I was in the neighborhood, so I thought I’d try on someone new and say hello.” Ruby opened Jack’s coat and examined it. “I really don’t get his fetish with this thing do you? It’s musky and old, _like this body_.”

“Then get out of him,” Sam growled.

Ruby scoffed. “That’s not what you were saying a _minute_ ago.”

Sam rushed forward, his bumbling awkwardness gone. He was a trained killer and he pressed the blade against Ruby’s borrowed throat as a reminder of that. “I mean it Ruby, or so help me I will _cut you out of him_.”

Sam was fuming. He was angry at Ruby for tricking him and he was angry at himself for not knowing better. He should know Jack well enough to realize when he’s not himself. After all why would Jack want to kiss him? Because they had hunting in common? Because they were both freaks? Because they were both lonely monsters? No. Jack was just temporarily aligned with him. He didn't want to stay with Sam, let alone kiss him.

Sam shook his head. He shouldn’t have fallen that easily for fake seduction, and he shouldn’t have wanted that kiss as badly as he did.

Ruby studied him, evaluating Sam's turmoil and the knife at her throat. “Will you?” She tested, and Sam applied more pressure, the skin in Jack’s neck indenting to assure her of his intent. “You need me Sam. Or did you just forget about Lilith?”

When she mentioned the white-eyed demon, Sam’s lips twisted into a smirk. “I don’t need to drink demon blood,” he announced suddenly. “Not anymore.”

“You’re not ready to take the bitch on by yourself,” she said skeptically. “Not yet at least.”

Sam tapped the blade against Jack’s throat and then withdrew it. Sliding off the bed he grinned down at Ruby triumphantly. “Remember that demon we were hunting in the badlands?”

Ruby watched him carefully, eyes still glued to the tip of the blade. “How could I forget? I saw what it was doing. I’ve stayed clear of this state until now, stuck my neck out just to find you because you haven’t been answering my calls.”

“It’s all over,” Sam continued, ignoring her. “Green-eyes died because of it. I spent a month showing Jack what I know so we could kill it and it…died. Just like that, right in front of me.” He pointed to the ground with the blade, Ruby’s eyes still following the tip.

“Congratulations,” she said dryly.

“Jack thinks it’s some kind of virus. But earlier in the week I was doing some research on the Dawson County Hospital. They had this weird spike in stomach flu cases. But get this; they were all reported vomiting blood, black blood. So I looked into the hospitals all around the area and the reports were the same. I didn’t put two and two together until last night but I think this demon-killing virus we’ve been seeing is the same thing those people had.

“You see, after the initial symptoms ninety percent of the patients walked out fine. I think it’s just where the demon rides them too hard that the host dies along with it.” Sam tapped the knife against his lips, obviously satisfied with himself. “It’s like a demon miracle cure; even I couldn’t do it any better.”

Sam was a foot away from Jack when Ruby spoke through him again, but this time it was like the Captain was calling out to him from across a void. “What about me?”

The hunter furrowed his brows.

“You’re going to let some virus wipe out demons and…you didn’t even stop to think about what would happen to me did you?”

Sam tilted his head. He looked at Ruby through the friend she was possessing and shrugged.

“That’s cold, Sam.”

Sam’s laugh was a bark, incredulous. “Yeah, well. Sorry if I don’t feel very sympathetic towards you right now...”

“Oh, what?” she shouted. “You’re still butthurt over that kiss? You _wanted_ it, and now you’re going to use that as a reason to watch me die? After everything that I’ve done for you, after everything we’ve been through?”

Sam shook his head. “You don’t understand. This is the first break I’ve had…since I can remember. My brother is dead, Ruby, and not only can I _not_ bring him back, the only way I can avenge his death is to do the very thing he never wanted me to do. I have an out here, and I’m taking it.”

“You’re so moral aren’t you Sam?" Ruby spat. "Like you didn’t always have a _choice_.”

The Winchester brother scowled, refusing to believe that. “Whatever.”

“You act like just because I’m the demon I forced you into this, but you practically begged me to show you what I know," Ruby shouted. "Now you’re feeling guilty. Now there’s something else out there to do the dirty work for you!” She bolted to her feet and wound around the bed, standing in front of Sam and staring down Jack’s long lonely face at him. “Instead of taking matters into your own hands and killing one demon bitch that’s got it coming, you’re just going to sit on your ass and wipe us all out? That’s some _fucking compromise_.”

Sam’s face was screwed tight. He avoided looking at Ruby, the thought of her still inside Jack making him boil with anger. “I think you should go.”

Her knife wasn’t being used to threaten her, but Ruby didn’t take that for granted. “Fine,” she said, backing off. “But this isn’t over Sam. I’ve worked too hard for you, and I’m not letting you go without a fight.”

Ruby didn’t give Sam a chance to ask any more questions. She immediately evacuated her current vessel in a thick swirling cloud of black smoke, leaving Jack’s body to collapse onto the mattress behind him. The hunter hid Ruby’s knife in the back of his pants, untucking his shirt to cover the handle before checking the Captain’s pulse. Ruby had left him alive and moments later Jack groaned, blinking his eyes open and glancing around in confusion.

“I feel like I’ve been hit by a semi…” Jack groaned.

“Are you alright?” Sam asked, suppressing a relieved smile. “You uh…collapsed while I was sleeping.”

“…Oh.” Jack pushed himself up with a bewildered grin, apparantly accepting Sam’s explanation at face value. “Sorry about that. My first moves are usually a little less desperate.”

Sam tried to smile but he failed miserably.

“Funny thing is,” Jack said, sorting through his memories and coming up blank. “I don’t even remember coming back.”

“Coming back,” Sam said quietly. “You’d already _left_?”

Jack avoided the Winchester’s gaze, raising a hand to his mouth. It felt swollen, and his lower lip was bleeding. “Was I _kissing_ somebody?” he asked with a licentious smile.

Sam suddenly hopped off the bed. The blade tucked behind his jeans dug into his skin and he winced, a reminder of what he was hiding. “You came back for your gun. And that’s when you…fell.”

Jack pulled his coat away and revealed the weapon holstered at his waist. He shrugged his eyebrows in mild surprise. “Oh,” he said again. After staring at the gun for a few moments he let his coat fall back to his side. The Captain returned his attention to Sam, whose back was turned. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said earnestly.

Sam shut his eyes and suppressed a shudder. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”

The Captain had meant to slip away in the dead of night without waking Sam, but for some reason he’d botched it. Now it was plain as day what his intentions were and as he guessed, Sam was taking it personally. He could say that he was sorry, or try to explain why goodbyes were hard for him, but he didn’t. Instead Jack glossed over the unspoken tension with a charming smile.

“You remember this?” He opened his wrist strap to display the blue light blinking slowly on his manipulator. Sam turned back to him, studied the strap and nodded. “There’s more Rift energy in the US than I realized. It charged pretty quickly.”

Jack handed him a crooked grin as a substitute for some kind of apology. “I still can’t remove the tracker but I’ve managed to dampen the signal so far. When I get on a plane back to New York though…I want them to _know_ I’m coming.”

Sam cocked his head. “You’re just going to hand yourself over?”

“I’m tired of playing games; I much prefer the direct approach.”

 “What are you going to say?” Sam challenged. “Hi I’m Captain Jack and oh by the way have you been poisoning demons?”

 Jack shrugged. “Something like that.”

Sam laughed. He figured it had to be some kind of joke; no one was that brazenly stupid. But when he caught the stone-cold flint in Jack’s eye he realized that, no, the Captain really _was_ that stupid. “And then what? You can’t just waltz in, ask for their master plans and figure out a way to stop them while they’re in the middle of a dramatic dialogue.”

“Why not?”

“ _Because that’s crazy,"_ Sam protested.

“No,” Jack smirked. “That’s Torchwood.”

Sam was speechless but there was a spark of admiration for the man's stupid persistance, a quality Winchesters like him were born and bred with. Jack caught that spark and his grin spread like wildfire, spreading to Sam as well and burning away any previous tension.

“You know…I don’t get you,” Sam blurted out. “Some days I would think, hey, here’s this ridiculous guy in suspenders, walking around with a cocky grin on his face, talking about space not like it’s millions of light years away but like it’s in our backyards. Some guy that struts around like Captain Planet but hits on everything that moves--”  Jack laughed at the description, and so did Sam.

“But then you get this look on your face and _it’s so old._ That’s when I realize I don’t know how long you’ve lived or what lives you’ve had. In fact I’m not really even sure what it is you did before I met you.” Sam studied the Captain, who looked as if he were beginning to bottle himself up inside his coat. “And it makes it seem all the more selfish when I consider asking if you can’t…just…stay?”

Jack looked up in surprise.

“Because I know what it’s like,” Sam continued. “To fight your whole life, and keep getting the shitty end of the stick. You realize if you’re ever really happy doing what you have to do you should consider it a blessing. And I think for the last month I was--”

“--Sam.” Jack cut him off firmly.

The Captain was shaken. For all of Sam’s bluster and sanctimony there was a very raw need he was trying to express. The plea sank down to his core, stirring feelings he had been trying to suppress for some time and for a moment, he was truly tempted. That’s why he had to stop.

“I had a good time, Sam. Don’t ever doubt that.” Jack rose and put one hand on the hunter’s shoulders. He felt the man go stiff as a board from his touch, cementing the Captain’s conviction to leave.

“But this virus was designed to kill, and that kind of power, with those kinds of people? I can’t sit back any longer. It’s not who I am.” He clapped the hunter on the back and smiled thinly. “Goodbye Sam.”

When the door closed it echoed around the room hollowly. Sam withdrew Ruby’s knife from his jeans and threw it to the floor, sinking heavily into a chair by the window.

The only thing left of the Captain now was the taste of blood in Sam’s mouth.


	11. Don't Look Back

Jack sat on the plane to New York with a renewed sense of clarity. The second death of Charles as a demon and this burgeoning scandal with UNIT had shocked him out of dormancy. Still suffering from his loss more than six months earlier, Jack had returned to Earth in a sort of mental haze. It was impossible for him to pick back up where he had left off: his organization had been destroyed and he suffered too much guilt to contact the last remaining member of his team. But Jack had missed Earth as much as he missed Torchwood, so when he came back Jack had tried to pick up the pieces and begin again, but his heart simply wasn’t in it.

He realized that now.

He was missing the conviction, that single-minded sense of purpose that allowed him to forget the empty ache in his chest. Funny how a case of mass genocide could make him remember that again. UNIT had hired him to reconnoiter, but it turns out the real mission was figuring out what the Unified Intelligence Taskforce was up to, and _boy_ the things he’d learned about them!

The blood work analysis Jack had first run was the key to his discovery. The first case he was called out to re-investigate (which was nothing more than signing some paperwork and hopping back on a plane), and the case he had accidentally discovered in the badlands were connected. The same substance was found in their blood though it hadn’t killed either victim.

Jack had a flurry of theories when he first discovered this, but he was missing one large chunk of information: demons. Knowing UNIT’s pragmatism they wouldn’t fall for the religious hype. They, like him, would most likely think of demons as alien, viral life forms. But no matter what they called them, they were well aware of the threat. Jack trusted Sam’s intel on this. That kid would know if someone was using demon-hunting tactics: he was a seasoned pro at that sort of thing. That meant, unless Susan had been acting of her own volition (which Jack very much doubted), UNIT soldiers not only knew about demons, they had been trained to fight them.

That led him back to the blood. That viscous liquid the second victim in the badlands had been purging itself of, presumably demon blood, was also in the first victim. The first victim, according to UNIT, was a closed case. Jack recalled sitting on the beach with General Erisa and how she had explained the incident as a “curiosity”, clarifying that she had been “persuaded by her superiors to take a second look”.

Then he thought about the extensive lengths UNIT had gone to cover up Sam’s and his escape from the Dawson County Hospital, a sleepy little town where no one was ever going to ask questions. That’s when it dawned on Jack: UNIT was trying to cover it up, not just from the public but from itself.

The New York division was fairly new, if Jack remembered right, and if he also remembered right there was always some tension in regards to receiving orders from across the Atlantic. _Typical Americans_ , Jack thought. So was the European division of UNIT the “superiors” Erisa was referring to, and if so why send Jack to investigate something they were trying to cover up?

Captain Jack Harkness had allied with UNIT for purely selfish means and not until now did he consider that UNIT might have done the same thing. Jack was probably the perfect ambassador for them, since he’d worked (although not well) with the European division in the past. He’d be the perfect unbiased opinion to sign off on whatever evidence they were trying to suppress. And why wouldn’t he have gone along with it? All the General needed was Jack’s okay and her “superiors” would leave the dirty operation she was running well enough alone. The Captain had been so discouraged from even speaking out of turn he may very well have signed whatever papers they wanted him to from sheer boredom.

Jack’s stomach flipped and it wasn’t because of the turbulence that momentarily jolted the plane. It was because he’d been duped.

But that left the question, what exactly _was_ UNIT hiding? Sam and the Captain had seen the effects of it as Charles -- unaffectionately dubbed the green-eyed demon before Jack had learned his true identity -- had died in Jack’s arms. What had once been the kind, strong, somewhat naïve member of Torchwood had all been burnt away: he was just a husk with some fragmented memories and a soul full of pain. Whatever they had done, it had caused his friend to die a horribly slow, painful death. Jack winced at the thought. Charles had been doing nothing _but_ dying for a century, and the Captain sincerely hoped the man had some kind of peace now.

He had theorized that vomiting blood was the symptom of some kind of a virus but the truth is he had no idea what it was. The Captain knew UNIT could be brilliant but he really didn’t think that in less than a year (which is approximately how long Jack had stopped keeping tabs on them) that a single New York division could engineer some kind of virus to so effectively kill off a newly discovered life form.

But _something_ was going on, and Captain Jack Harkness was going to figure out what it was, and then he was going to stop it.

His only regret was that Sam wasn’t going to be there to help him.

The plane’s flight attendant was making her rounds, a pretty young woman with her long hair pulled back into a bun. She asked if Jack wanted anything and he requested a whiskey. She returned moments later with a plastic cup filled with ice and a mini bottle of Jack Daniels. The Captain always liked minis, they amused him, but it was the bitter sting of whiskey that he craved because that’s what it felt like to think about Sam.

His first impression of the kid had been as a murderer, but now all Jack remembers is wanting to pull Sam close, wanting to run his fingers through the man’s hair and to kiss his lips until all of those obnoxious, evasive comments turned into soft, lusty moans. And if the Captain wasn’t mistaken, that’s exactly what Sam wanted too.

Jack took another sip of whiskey, closing his eyes and savoring the sting and the warm, heady feeling it left in his throat.

He hadn’t been afraid of Sam rebuffing him. Jack was like a walking, open invitation: those who were interested made the first move and those who weren’t went about their merry business. Sam never advanced on the Captain, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t interested. Whenever Jack made a lewd comment Sam would smile and roll his eyes but Jack recognized the natural curiosity that lingered. In the past that would have been enough to prompt a reaction from the Captain, something to coax the situation along, but not this time. This time Jack had left it at a stale mate between them.

Jack didn’t want to get _entangled_. In fact he had intended for his exit to be quiet and smooth. He didn’t want to say goodbye to Sam because he knew it would hurt, so he had dressed and left. At least he thought he had, it all got a bit fuzzy after that. Jack woke up feeling shagged senseless, which was surprisingly unsatisfying. Sam was in a mood, the kind Jack never tried to figure out, and then he made some impassioned speech with those puppy-dog eyes that made the Captain just the faintest bit weak in the knees.

Jack had wanted to run out of the room as quickly as he could. Instead he gave some cheap words of comfort (‘had a good time’ could he have sounded like any more of a jerk?) that left such a bitter taste in his mouth even the whiskey couldn’t wash it out.

The flight attendant made her final rounds, collecting trash. The Captain handed her his empty plastic cup and mini bottle of whiskey. She thanked him.

Maybe at one point in time he could have been a hunter, but that was before Torchwood. It was over now between him and Sam, whatever it was that they had. UNIT required his full attention and Jack was on his way to confront them. And maybe in the end, it was best he handled something like this alone.

As the plane descended Jack had a beautiful view of the changing Manhattan skyline. Landing in La Guardia, the General’s insistence-- that the world was different since the 456-- played over and over again in his head like a broken record. Yes, Jack thought, it _was_ different. There might always be some imminent threat, ideological or not, hanging over Earth’s head. But alien threats are never an excuse to abdicate your own humanity.

The plane bounced twice as it touched the tarmac, effortlessly gliding to a stop after a few minutes. Despite the signal above his head, the Captain unbuckled his seatbelt and listlessly stared out the window where he spotted a set of military vehicles from the left side of the plane with a troop of soldiers standing around them. Even from here Jack could see the red berets.

The plane’s intercom pinged, and the pilot’s voice rang out, calm and friendly inside the cabin. “Ladies and gentleman there will be a slight delay before we arrive at the terminal. We’ve just been informed our arrival gate may have been changed, so please bear with us for a few moments.”

Jack tensed, studying the soldiers outside the plane. From here he could just make out a pair of handset radios and he guessed they were using these to communicate to the pilots inside. The Captain rose from his seat and headed toward the cockpit but he was cut off by the pleasant little flight attendant that had served him whiskey earlier.

“Excuse me sir we haven’t yet reached the terminal, please return to your seat and we’ll—“

“No need,” Jack interrupted, “that’s my personal escort out there.” He flipped open his manipulator, the signal UNIT had been tracking still flashing strongly. “So if you and all these nice people want to get home on time without this ‘slight delay’ you’ll let me through.” Jack didn’t wait for a response, pushing past her until he reached the cockpit door. Pressing a button on his manipulator the door unlocked and slid open, the pilot and the co-pilot swinging around to greet him in surprise.

It was clear they were having some kind of heated discussion over the pilot’s headset so with no introduction Jack pulled it off of the plane’s Captain and slid the communication device over his own ears.

“Captain Jack Harkness, here. Trick question, am I wanted dead or alive?”

The co-pilot, an older woman with attractive eyes, was staring at him open-mouthed, about to ask ten questions but not sure which to stumble over first. Jack winked at her as he waited for the voice on the other end.

Finally something gruff and husky barked at him through the headset. “Surrender yourself peacefully Captain or you’ll be putting everyone on that plane at risk.”

“I _was_ coming peacefully,” Jack scowled. “You’re the idiots who have to show up with more weaponry than you know what to do with. All dressed up and no one to shoot!”

There was a pause and then a grunt. “How do you want to do this?”

Jack shrugged his brows, surprised by the reasonability of the request. “They’ll open the cockpit door. I’ll climb out, you take me away and everybody here can go back to their normal lives. Agreed?”

“Are you armed?” The soldier questioned.

Of course he still had his Webly tucked into his holster. A few years back Jack had worked out an understanding with a federal air marshal over a couple of drinks and a long night in a hotel. The kid hacked his name into the Law Enforcement Officers Flying Armed program with top notch clearances, and ever since then he’s never had a problem with the TSA.

 “With something to blow up two armored cars?” Jack looked over to the pilots and rolled his eyes in exasperation as if he expected them to understand his frustration. “If I wanted to be man-handled by men in tight uniforms there are less dangerous way of doing it.”

There was another pause and from the cockpit Jack could see UNIT discussing something amongst themselves; then the reply came. “Agreed.”

Jack ripped off the headset and tossed it back to the pilot. He ignored the baffled old man and turned to the woman beside him. “I need you to let me off this plane. Now.”

But the baffled old man wouldn’t be ignored. He turned around and shouted at them both, his jowls flapping like an old bulldog. “Hang on! What in god’s name is going on here?” he demanded.

“Not god’s name,” Jack corrected, “ _mine_.”

“Are you some sort of criminal?” The co-pilot asked suddenly, studying him with her large brown eyes. She wasn’t scared, she was just curious.

Jack smirked, “All the more reason to get rid of me.”

Despite further protests from the pilot, the co-pilot (Joanna, that’s what her name tag said) left the cabin and escorted Jack to the exit nearest them. When the passengers saw them emerging a collective murmur arose. Joanna directed the flight attendant to keep their passengers calm and seated as she approached the aircraft door.

The co-pilot placed her hands on the interior handle and glanced back to Jack. “You don’t look like a criminal,” she added.

Jack noticed the evacuation slide at the bottom of the door and filled with silent glee. He grinned at Joanna. “Maybe not today.”

~~

UNIT sat on the tarmac with a collection of two armored vehicles, one covered transport vehicle, and a squad of 18 soldiers. They had all been debriefed that their prisoner was extremely dangerous and that he must be brought into custody immediately. If the Captain used force, they were ordered to return it. If the Captain tried to escape, they were given permission to shoot to kill, just so long as they brought back the body. So when the cabin door of the just-landed Boeing 747 swung open, the entire squadron took aim simultaneously.

They had prepared a forklift to obtain the Captain but instead a large, orange slide instantly inflated, rolling out of the plane and floating down to the tarmac like some child’s pool toy. This was their first image of Captain Jack Harkness: jumping from the plane with his arms crossed over his chest and riding down the slide like he was at Disney Land. At the end of the ride the Captain jumped to his feet, clamping a hand on Captain Stirling, the man he had negotiated with over the pilot’s headset.

“I haven’t done that since 3025,” Jack laughed. He leaned on Captain Stirling until he caught his breath, ignoring the dozen guns pointed at his own head. “Crash landed on a paradise planet with a river of naturally distilled vodka. Nobody wanted to be rescued except me.”

Captain Stirling forcibly removed Jack’s hand from his shoulder while another soldier stepped forward and positioned Jack’s wrists in front of him, snapping on a pair of handcuffs and then pushing up the sleeve of his greatcoat to unfasten his manipulator. Jack didn’t resist but his toothy grin faded. While this was being done Stirling gave Jack a quick pat down, removing his Webly.

“Double teaming,” Jack observed dryly, unhappy to be without his manipulator again. And since he’d gone through shit to get the Webly back he didn’t want to see that go either. “I didn’t realize that was a standard UNIT greeting, I would have joined a lot sooner.”

Captain Stirling ignored his prisoner’s remarks, nodding to another pair of soldiers. “Load him up,” he grunted.

Escorted by a pair of guns to his back Jack was roughly led to a covered vehicle. “Don’t I get my rights read to me?” he blustered, stumbling along the tarmac. The barrels of the soldiers’ guns were being used to drive him forward and prodded into his side and his lower back, less out of necessity than a stupid display of power.

“This is a military arrest for the murder of Unified Intelligence Private Susan Boyd,” Stirling announced, observing their progress several paces behind. “You _have_ no rights.”

The soldiers that had escorted Jack grabbed him by the arms and prepared to load him into the back of the vehicle. Jack tried to tug himself away from them, glaring back at Stirling. It was the first time he had shown any resistance.

“One of yours goes down and this is what you do? No questions asked?” Jack growled, refusing to be loaded like a sheep to slaughter. “Where was that kind of justice for _my_ team when the 456 came? Where was UNIT?!”

Stirling took a step back. He was surprised by the sudden rage but it also confirmed the reports that he was given: this man was dangerous, far more so than he first appeared. Deaf to Jack’s indignation he waved another soldier and nodded to Jack with the same grunt that followed every order he gave. “Shut him up.”

The butt of a rifle slammed into the side of Jack’s head. The Captain bounced off the side of the vehicle before collapsing onto the tarmac, effectively silencing him. Then he was hauled to his feet and unceremoniously jammed into the back of the covered vehicle like a sack of potatoes. He lay there on the truck’s bed, staring blankly at the cold metal ceiling while letting the blood from his now-broken nose dribble across his cheek. He was joined by two soldiers who climbed into the back with him before the hatch was closed.

Captain Jack turned weakly to the pair sitting on the opposite side of the truck. He heard the other soldiers departing, climbing into the other armored cars. The engine of the truck roared to life beneath him and Jack felt the vehicle jerk forward as they began to depart.

“So,” Jack smiled weakly. “A private place, two men in uniform, and me in a pair of handcuffs; I wonder what could happen?”

The soldiers exchanged nervous glances and gripped their guns tighter.

~~

Jack finally sat up after about an hour of bouncing around in the back of UNIT’s covered vehicle. From the two small windows in the side he saw them crossing the Hudson, once again transferring him from New York to New Jersey. He watched with particular interest as they drove down the Garden State Parkway but he was far less familiar with Jersey then her sister to the north.

It wasn’t until they passed the long white beaches on Sandy Hook that Jack recognized where he had been brought, and minutes later they passed a sign that stated this was “Fort Hancock: Historic District”. If this had been a less serious situation, Jack may have cracked a few jokes about the name. As it was, his current company was painfully tight-lipped.

Eventually they pulled into a large park where the troop of vehicles finally came to a stop. The back door of the vehicle was flung open and Jack was hauled out as the rest of the squadron formed a semi-circle around their prisoner. “You didn’t even have the decency to lock me up in New York?” Jack mocked. “You’ve got to ship me to Jersey?”

Captain Stirling stepped forward from the circle and scowled at Jack’s persistent cheekiness. “This is where we keep the garbage,” he sneered.

Two pairs of rifles dug their way into the Captain’s side once more, ushering him through the semi-circle of bright red caps screwed onto stern faces. “Isn’t that what I said?” Jack muttered.

As they marched him forward Jack recognized an old gun battery in the distance, walls of cement rising from the earth, crippled and stained from lack of use since the Cold War. The Captain vaguely remembered reading Fort Hancock had been repurposed by UNIT, but for exactly what function eluded him.

As they progressed the civilian path deteriorated into a mass of overgrown weeds and bushes and the battery itself was encircled with a wire mesh fence. A large brown sign had been staked outside and in white letters it spelled out EXTREMELY HAZARDIOUS CONDITIONS: AREA CLOSED.  The squadron halted in front of the battery and for a moment Jack wondered if they weren’t just going to shoot him, bury him, and say that their business was done.

Instead, Captain Stirling removed a small control panel from his pocket and punched in a five-digit code. After the code was entered he pocketed the device and stared straight ahead like he was waiting for a matinee to start. The entire company followed suit, staring ahead at the overgrown mess. For a beat there was complete and total silence and then Jack saw what they were waiting for. The air in front of him wavered like a mirage and then the battery disappeared completely, revealing a small military compound.

“A shimmer?!” Jack blurted out, twisting his head to lock eyes with Captain Stirling. But the squadron had already started to march again and Jack was bid to do the same, his audience reduced to the soldiers behind him. “When the hell did you guys figure out a shimmer?”

Predictably, the soldiers remained silent.

After a series of security checks where Jack was constantly referred to as “the” prisoner they led him to a single, gray, three story building. The building was connected to a white-wash warehouse and this is where they led him, directing him to stand in front of one of the many industrial roll up doors. With the squadron to his back the door began to open slowly, grinding loudly against its gears. Jack ducked inside before it had opened fully, blinking from the transition of the hot midday sun into the cool shade of the building. He let his eyes adjust, studying the contents of the warehouse. It wasn’t until the door had stopped and then began to close again that Jack realized no one had followed him inside.

He raised his cuffed hands to shield his eyes from the sun but he caught the glitter of a dozen guns pointing straight at his head. Jack stopped in his tracks, standing still as the door continued to lower between him and the UNIT soldiers.

“Uh, guys,” Jack called out nervously. “You forgot to uncuff me.” He jingled his wrists but by now the door had lowered past the soldiers’ heads, and eventually past their guns but that didn’t deter Jack from shouting uselessly. “And I could use a cup of coffee when you get a chance!”

There was a loud, reverberating THUNK as the door finally closed. Captain Jack had been purposefully left here alone (as far as he knew) and that knowledge made him nervous.

The warehouse itself was two stories tall with a series of small, grimy windows lining the top. At first glance the contents inside the storage facility seemed innocuous, no obvious tech or looming doomsday devices. There were endless rows of boxes and files stacked from floor to ceiling like a collator’s wet dream, and in between the endless sea of shelves were crates of various sizes stacked atop one another. Jack was flanked by a pair of these shelves, but at the end he could see the outline of a car draped in canvas. Military, he guessed, possibly an SUV.

It briefly reminded the Captain of the vaults in Torchwood.

Since he was dumped here Jack decided to take a look at what was being stored, trying to piece together the larger puzzle as he did. What was UNIT up to with these demons? Why had they gone through all this trouble to dump him into some useless storage container? And did they even have the capability to make him coffee?

Turning to the first set of boxes Jack lifted his cuffed wrists and pushed open the cardboard flaps, reaching in to poke at the contents. He found a series of books, covered in dust and slightly damp from neglect. Removing the book on top Jack blew off the dust coating the cover, watching as it eddied about him and drifted to his feet. It was a thick manual and in the dim light he could just make out the title: The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson. Jack smiled, running his hand over the cover, formless memories coming into sudden sharpness. He remembered the night Suzie Costello came back from the dead, when his Hub had been under involuntary lockdown. He remembered Ianto coming through with the phones, the police laughing at their mishap, and everyone working together as a team to bring back Gwen.

The nostalgia of Jack’s old life brought both a silent joy and a muted ache. If he had ever doubted how much he missed it, all that doubt was now wiped away.

The Captain weighed the volume in his hand and flipped open the cover. Inside, written in a masculine hand with sharpie was “to Suzie, love daddy”.

Jack frowned.

He slammed the cover shut like he’d just seen a ghost, and after a beat he examined the book more closely. It wasn’t just a trigger for Jack’s memory, this was THE book, the key that Torchwood had to use in order to unlock the Hub and stop Suzie from killing Gwen. It was impossible for _that_ book to be here though; it had to be a coincidence. Jack had put this back with Suzie’s other things, back into storage, away from Torchwood….

The Captain whipped around, ripping through the other books inside the box like a mad man. Inside every single one he found similar inscriptions ‘to suzie’, ‘for suzie’, ‘this is suzie’s’. More alarmed by the second, Jack threw the box to the floor and opened the one beneath it. It was full of framed pictures of Suzie Costello, an ex-employee of Torchwood.

Jack stepped back from the shelves, his head reeling, unable to comprehend exactly what he was seeing.

When he caught his breath Jack turned to the shelf behind him and ripped open another box. This time he recognized the items instantly, the memory was all too recent and he had helped pack them himself: they were Owen Harper’s personal belongings.

He ran down the line and opened another box. It was Toshiko Sato.

Jack’s heart was racing, beating like a wild drum in his chest. He ran even farther and was stopped dead in tracks. He was fixated on a group of boxes labeled on the outside with a delicate female hand. Jack recognized Gwen’s handwriting and it mournfully spelled out two words that froze Jack’s blood: Ianto Jones.

The Captain felt a sob form in his chest like a knot, rising to his throat where he refused to untangle it. He bit back the emotion; gingerly running his hand over the box like the man was still there to feel Jack’s skin on his cheek.

Letting his palm drop back to his side Jack caught the outline of the tarp-covered car from the corner of his eyes. He slowly turned to face it, smelling the charred leather and burnt rubber for the first time. Reaching forward with both hands Captain Jack yanked off the tarp.

He stared, open-mouthed, at the burnt out husk of what had once been a black SUV, Torchwood clearly engrained on the side just below the hood.

It was clear to the Captain now. This entire warehouse was a graveyard of Jack’s past, packed up and sorted like the lives of his dead employees.

And he was here to complete it.


	12. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Jack ran his fingers along the TORCHWOOD insignia carved into the SUV. The hull was cold to his touch but his own heart felt like it was on fire, beating so fiercely it was difficult even to breathe.

For a moment the warehouse echoed with the ghost of laughter. Jack could see his team climbing into the SUV, heading back to the Hub. Owen was making crass remarks about the case they had just put to rest and it made Gwen bark with laughter while Tosh smiled quietly over a small computer and its endless scrolling calculations. Ianto made a quip at the doctor’s expense and he and Jack would share a quiet chuckle, a meaningful glance, all while Owen mumbled his discontent.

It was happiness, for a few brief, fleeting seconds and then the Captain blinked, and it was gone. There was no one in the car. There was no one laughing. There was no one left, just Captain Jack and a pile of boxes.

He twisted the tarp in his hands, rage quickly displacing sorrow. Jack wanted this game to come to an end. _Now_. But before he could do something stupid, like pushing shelves over, or cursing various names, there was a subtle click at the end of the warehouse, like a door that had closed. Jack’s head jerked towards the noise. Every muscle was tensed and ready, searching the dim light for the first signs of who, or what, had come for him.

Through the dust and the mold he heard a haughty, familiar voice. “When I was a Captain stationed in London I met an incredible man, once.”

A pair of standard military boots echoed across the warehouse and then the stiff, wooden figure of General Erisa Magambo emerged as if the Void itself had spat her back out. “He saved a bus full of people with nothing but his wit and that curious sonic device of his.” She stopped just in front of the Captain, noting how he had frayed around the edges since they’d last met. “Of course he expected us to take care of the monsters that followed him through the wormhole, from some godforsaken planet back to London.”

“The Doctor,” Jack concluded softly. He hated the admiration in The General’s voice. He hated to think that they had both been Captains with the same awe, with the same loyalty and allegiance. Worst of all he hated to think that the Doctor might look at them both today and not see any difference.

“The man who hates guns,” she agreed. “But thank goodness we had them then.” She stood before him with a patience that disgusted Jack. He didn’t need a lesson in ethics and he didn’t care what she had to say about his old friend.

“Don’t bring him into this,” Jack warned, his anger renewed and coiling in his gut. “Don’t you even _dare_.”

“I met him again,” the General continued, her voice cold like steel, cutting through Jack’s bluster and demanding that he listen. He couldn’t do anything _but_ listen. “And again he spurns our weapons. As if we were to sit back on our hands and watch him save us over and over again. But you and I know better don’t we? Captain.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Jack repeated. His fingers kneaded into the canvas, the bone of his knuckle threatening to push through his skin.

But the General finished her thought, and it wasn’t what she said that tore him, it was the pity in her eyes. “We know he doesn’t _always_ come.”

 “Stop it!” Jack shouted, tossing the canvas at the General’s feet.

General Erisa stood by, watching him quietly. She arched a single a brow at him, unmoved and unimpressed by his tantrum.

Jack reined his emotions back in, realizing this was neither the time nor the place to see red. Not if he wanted any straight answers. “You could have shot me and buried me by now,” Jack started carefully, “but you _wanted_ me to see this. So then just _tell_ me…why?”

The General surveyed the skeletal remains of Jack’s organization with a brief, stilted glance. “Containment,” she answered. “After Torchwood’s destruction, UNIT thought it was in the best global interest to excavate the site in Cardiff, and other proprieties affiliated to Torchwood, lest alien technologies fall into the wrong hands. As you well know, our governments have a history of making poor decisions.”

“And why is it in New Jersey?” Jack quipped.

 “UNIT has _many_ facilities scattered over the northeast coast, abandoned bases that have been renovated. It was decided that the remains of Torchwood would be stored here, away from those that might have more malevolent interests than ours, and for that particular reason Fort Hancock has been a special focus of mine.

“You see,” she continued, “I was given the option to work with the New York division after the 456. I saw it as _uniqu_ e opportunity, a chance to focus on our defenses.” The General’s eyes glinted with pride. “We found something, Captain, something I’m sure even Torchwood long forgot.”

Captain Jack wavered and swallowed, his throat dry. “Show me.”

Without any further prompting, the General guided Captain to an adjoining building, down a long hallway. For a second Jack considered knocking the General out, bashing her head against a wall and making a break for it. But he didn’t. He had come too far to be deprived of the answers that he desperately needed, and the General knew that. Just as everything UNIT did, when General Erisa confronted him alone it was just another manipulative display of power.

They stopped in front of an unmarked door with a faint green glow emanating from beneath it. General Erisa opened the door and Jack eagerly followed suit, but when he got his first look at the source of the luminescent glow Jack froze.

“My god,” he whispered.

Stretching from floor to ceiling was a large, cylindrical tank with dozens of wires and tubes flowing from its base and into various computers around the room. Floating in the center of that tank was the alien Captain Jack Harkness had first saved from Torchwood in 1899: the Sententia.  Now it had found its way to UNIT in the 21st century.

This was the thing Charles had blamed for burning his soul away. Jack had assumed it was long dead, leaving behind some broken copy of his friend’s neural existence. In fact it was alive, but different from how Jack first remembered. It had been bigger, fuller, and healthier-looking back then. Over time it had shriveled up like a piece of fruit under the sun and turned green, casting the lab in an eerie, radioactive light.

It had once made the dreary walls of Victorian Torchwood glitter like they were made of gold, and now it was plugged into a machine as a freak experiment. This is exactly what Jack had _not_ wanted for this thing the day it washed ashore on Tiger Bay. But he had not been there the day Charles died, or the month Torchwood had packed away his things. He had still considered himself an ancillary part of Torchwood then. It wasn’t his responsibility, it had been Emily’s.

But it _was_ his responsibility now. Whoever’s fault it was that this thing ended up like it did, he had to deal with it.

Jack approached the tank, placing his cuffed palms on the surface and tentatively pressing his forehead to the glass. This creature was an empath, he remembered that much, and the last person it had connected to had died about 100 years ago. If it hadn’t connected to anyone else in that time, maybe he could reach out to it now. The Captain wasn’t sure what he would learn, but it was worth a shot, so Jack shut his eyes and tried to block out the smell of antiseptic and blood and focus.

In the fifty-first century, Captain Jack’s time with the Agency taught him to keep a strict lid on his thoughts. It was usually a defensive maneuver against anyone or any _thing_ trying to figure out his mission, but today he was lifting that lid and even projecting in an attempt to reach out to the alien in the tank.

He took his emotions (happy thoughts, he told himself, the things probably scared enough) and he pushed them out into the space between the Sententia and himself. At first he felt nothing, still groping in the dark for some tendril of connection. And then it came, like a shock: Jack was suddenly overcome with an acute feeling of total _hatred_. It burned through him like fire, igniting every synapse and nearly dropping him to his knees.

Jack snapped open his eyes, immediately aborting the attempt. His mind had instantly severed the pathway between them, he assumed in order to save himself. The connection had only lasted for a total of a few seconds but Jack could still feel the effects. His hands were shakier, and his head felt light. The anger the Captain had felt earlier had burnt up, leaving him empty.

This wasn’t the friendly creature that Jack had once read about. It wasn’t even the same thing that he had discovered in Cardiff. The conclusion was obvious: something had changed the Sententia.  “What did they do to you…?” Jack whispered, staring mournfully into that green, hazy tank.

“We saved it,” was the reply, loud and clear from behind him. Jack pushed himself away from the Sententia and jerked his head to the side.

General Erisa was standing in the corner of the lab working at a computer station, apparently oblivious to his attempts to communicate with the alien. “This is the condition we found it in,” she informed him. “Living in a fish bowl in the chemical makeup of the tank before you; we believe it created that environment itself. It was brought back to our labs for testing and UNIT has since discovered it’s quite a marvelous little thing. Despite looks, completely sentient, and with the mental capacity three times that of a normal human.”

“And yet here it is,” Jack snapped, “at the mercy of _idiots_!”

General Erisa studied him curiously as if he was another alien she would like to dissect, peeling off his skin to see what made him tick. “You’re very certain of its innocence,” she tested, making that first incision and cutting him along the abdomen in a perfect, clean line. “But our research shows something less conclusive than your convictions.”

Though impeded by his handcuffs, Jack shrugged his coat, his second skin, a little bit closer.

“Not only is it intelligent,” the General pursued, “it’s extremely plastic, adaptable. It has the ability to create the basic building blocks of life and alter them for its needs, instantaneously, as if the creature simply had to think a command. Curiously, it uses this ability to find the weakness in a living organism, producing something in order to destroy it. It’s been waiting, Captain, for a very long time in order to kill.”

The green light of the alien danced eerily across the General’s features. There was a long moment of silence as Jack chewed through what he had learned: demons, the perceived threat of another 456 incident, and the discovery of a toxin-producing alien.

“That’s why you transferred to New York…isn’t it?” he said carefully. “You found a _weapon,_ and you wanted to use it.”

The General did not deny his conclusion. “You’ll see that I have good reason,” she said, and turned to the computer beside her. After a few keystrokes a large theatre-sized screen materialized beside her.

 _The IMAX experience_ , Jack thought, _I wonder if this comes in 3D_.

The screen displayed a photograph of a UNIT soldier and the General referred to this as she continued. “Approximately a year ago the New York division discovered a new species after a breach of security. At first it was thought to be an impersonation, a shape-shifter such as a Nostrovite, but then it was later confirmed to be an invasive life form.”

“Demons,” Jack confirmed, recognizing the large black eyes.

General Erisa cocked her head, amused by his response. “I hadn’t taken you for a theist, Captain?”

Jack frowned, briefly embarrassed. He never challenged Sam’s theological insistence on naming those creatures ‘demons’. Come to think of it, he wasn’t really sure why. “I’m not,” he assured her.

The General, unconcerned with the Captain’s flustered ego, simply continued. “Outside of a corporeal form they appear to exist as a thick cloud of smoke. Once they choose a host, they invade through the lungs and from there they absorb themselves into the blood stream, where they have access to the brain and the central nervous system, essentially giving them—“

 “—complete control.” Jack interrupted. “I know. I’ve been doing my own research.”

“So have we. We call them the Mali Contagium.”

The Captain’s Latin had been getting some good exercise lately. “Evil infection,” he translated.

The General nodded, and on the screen before them a large map of the US was displayed. It was, in fact, in 3D. “Once we discovered this life form we researched their occurrence and found a persistent pattern of what might be considered naturally occurring phenomena that followed in their wake.”

“Omens.” The Captain grinned and mentally patted himself on the back for passing his pop quiz.

“Given this, our software has collected a pool of data on weather patterns, missing persons, unsolved murders, and mysterious bovine slaughters. Then from a specific set of algorithms we’ve determined an estimate of how many of the Mali have surfaced at a time.” The General made an adjustment to the map and a date (2003) appeared at the top right corner, along with it less than a dozen red marks across the US. “As you could guess, the red indicates the Mali’s presence.”

Jack studied the unalarming number scattered across the screen. “That’s some invasion, General,” he said wryly.

“Keep watching, Captain.”

The year was now 2005, and the dots were scattered elsewhere. Their numbers were still fairly small. Then 2007 appeared, and there was suddenly an explosion of red across the map, strongly focused in the middle of Wyoming. Jack’s jaw dropped. There had to be numbers ranging in the hundreds, maybe even thousands. How had he _not known_ about something like this?

“The center of this is a graveyard.” General Erisa motioned to the cluster in Wyoming. “We believe it may be, as in Cardiff, the source of a Rift. Of course these creatures are not solely isolated in the US. We expanded the parameters of our search and found similar concerns.” Now the map encompassed the entire Earth and where there were large populations of people, there were also huge masses of red.

Captain Jack’s eyes went straight to Wales. It was just as bad there and his stomach lurched.

“Under our noses all this time, infecting men, women, and _children_ alike.” The General made a point to emphasize children, and it had the desired effect. Jack had to close his eyes to fight back the rising bile in his gullet. “They’ve demonstrated the ability to organize and they appear to choose humans for a specific purpose, though exactly what that purpose is we’ve yet determine. But the numbers don’t lie, Captain: this is a slow but sure _invasion_.”

Jack had been hunting demons with Sam for over a month and yet he had never visualized it at this scale. But Sam had, and Jack had sanctimoniously dismissed the hunter. Captain Jack began to doubt his own motives. Did he really care about demons, or did he just care that UNIT was doing something without his knowledge?

The evidence was all around him. UNIT was alive and well, and Torchwood was dead, purposefully packed away and forgotten. The 456 had destroyed everything he had worked so hard to build but UNIT had survived. In fact it was thriving, and Jack would be lying if he thought that didn’t bother him. He _did_ have an issue with UNIT, sometimes they _did_ go too far, but Jack had always thought he was above his own bias.

But obviously he wasn’t as objective as he’d thought.

Jack sat on a desk opposite the General. He was suddenly exhausted with the information he’d received but there was still more to explain, and Erisa looked eager to share. “You said it was waiting to kill,” Jack began, wearily motioning to the Sententia. “…I take it you gave it something to kill.”

The Genera’s eyes glinted with pride. “From our first discovery of the Mali we obtained a blood sample. We introduced this sample to the remnant discovered in Torchwood, and in 48 hours it had produced a toxin specifically designed to neutralize the target. A virus.”

Captain Jack’s brows raised in mild surprise. At least he was right about one thing.

“After extensive testing we determined it was harmless to humans, and in fact remained completely dormant until injected into the blood stream. Once the Mali invade through the blood they become corrupted. The virus identifies the invading body, begins to break it down, and ejects it.”

Jack grimaced. “And that’s why they…. _vomit_?”

“Yes,” the General corroborated. “They’re purging themselves.”

“And the Mali?”

“Dead. We expanded our testing grounds to the state of Montana, and as you can see after only two months, Mali activity is currently at zero.”

Jack sighed through his nose, crossing his arms and leaning forward. “You plugged a couple of genetic sequences into an alien and you just accepted the poison it gave you?” He was scrambling for some moral ground to stand on. “I saw three dead bodies in that state, _all_ infected with this virus of yours.”

“They didn’t die because of the virus, Captain. We’ve done our own investigation and Doretta Renée, the report you were sent to corroborate, died because of the Mali. She had been running for three days without food or water. After the virus killed the invading body, she later died of heart failure.”

That’s what the coroner had said as well, that the first victim had died of heart failure. It was odd because she was so young, that’s why Jack had first suspected the substance in her blood. But he had learned a hell of a lot since a month ago.

In fact hadn’t the host died on Jack’s first hunt? That farmhand in the grain warehouse was exorcised by Sam and he dropped like a sack of, well, grain. The hunter later explained that sometimes demons liked taking their victims for a ride, just because it was fun. They didn’t always survive that ride.

Still, if UNIT already knew about the cause of Doretta Renée’s death, there was no reason to drag him into all of this to begin with. “You sent me to Montana to investigate something you already knew?”

“Yes,” the General confirmed. “Don’t ask surprised, Captain, we informed you of this at the time.”

“Right….” Jack drawled, unconvinced. “Because you needed a second opinion.” He was sure there were some internal politics being played here. The General projected that she was doing this with the full blessing of UNIT’s central command but Jack was convinced she was just out here playing cowboys and Indians. “And why else?”

“Because it was our intention that you join us.”

That information came as a slap in the face. Captain Jack wanted to laugh but Erisa’s total conviction was less funny than it was creepy. “C _ome again_?”

“Your bias against UNIT is well known, as are your _renegade_ tendencies.” She sat on her own desk, mimicking the Captain. The General had her hands folded in her lap and she spoke as if she were explaining an obvious truth to a petulant child. “So we sent you to our test site in Montana _expecting_ you to eventually break away and form your own investigation. We hoped, given the evidence, you would come to the same conclusion that we had.”

Jack was stunned. He thought he was struggling against UNIT for some greater good, but this whole time had been some pawn in their larger scheme. “What conclusion?” he asked listlessly.

“That acting defensively, this is the rare occasion where genocide is acceptable.”

“So this was all _a set up_?”

Erisa nodded, just once.

“And Susan?”

“She was sent to help guide you, monitor the information you received, and to protect you. I know that she was attacked by the Mali and I apologize for the dramatic arrest. Subterfuge, in this case, was deemed necessary.”

Jack scoffed bitterly. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting by bringing up Susan, some kind of absolution from her death, perhaps? As it turns out he should have trusted her to begin with, but instead he abandoned her at the hotel where Charles went looking for him. She was sent to protect him and he got her killed. He could blame the General for not warning him, and she could blame him for abandoning his post.

The truth was that Susan was another life on a very long list. He knew that, and Erisa did as well. Once again it made them seem more similar than he liked.

“How did you know…I wouldn’t get possessed?” Jack asked. There he was again, using theological terminology, but at this point he didn’t care. “I could have come back to UNIT and destroyed you.”

“That’s unlikely,” the General assured him. “Because we’ve already innoculated you.”

“ _You what_?”

“With an ingestible version,” she explained.  “A large dose, so that it absorbed into your blood.”

“Wait, when did you—“ Jack paused, wondering when UNIT would have had the opportunity, and then it dawned on him. “ _The lemonade_?” He huffed. “Is nothing sacred to you people!”

It was a pointless question, an idiotic point to get angry over, but anger was the only kind of control he had left. “You should have just told me!” Jack insisted, pulling at the cuffs around his wrists. “From the very beginning.”

General Erisa had finished her autopsy. She believed she had poked and prodded at the Captain enough to understand his basic functions. She wasn’t sorry she had cut him open like this, but she did look sorry _for_ him. “Would you have even considered?”

Captain Jack had nothing to say to that, he just lowered his head. “…what happens now?”

The General shifted, more contemplative than he had seen her before. It bothered him to think she was being genuine. “As I've said this was done in the hopes that you would join us.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You will remain in our custody for the remainder of your contract, perhaps assigned research or other cases that don’t require you to travel abroad. After that we will wipe your memory and you will be provided everything you need to rebuild Torchwood.”

Jack stared at her dubiously. “You’ll _give_ me Torchwood even if I don’t help?”

“Yes.”

“And if I do help, you still wipe my memory?”

“The procedure is the same,” she said.

“But why,” Jack pressed. “Why would you go through all of this to convince me to join you and then, still help me even if I turned you down?”

“The Doctor--” she began, and Jack scowled. He twisted his wrists in the cuffs and wished he’d gone with his first plan, knocking the General out and escaping. “--does not destroy this agency. He hates our guns but he also knows that we do what we must, and even what _he_ cannot. UNIT sees Torchwood as an ally. In this fight of ours two is better than one.”

“If that was _really_ the case, you could just let me go,” Jack said. “As it stands you’re still looking to gain from this indentured servitude of mine. That has more to do with _UNIT’s_ interest than the world’s.”

“Perhaps,” the General conceded with little fight. “But it doesn’t change the matter at hand.”

 _It was worth a shot_ , Jack sighed. “You realize what you’re asking me though: to wipe out an entire species?”

“Admittedly Captain, I am not a theist either. But I _do_ believe that some things are simply just evil. The kind of evil that cannot be threatened, it can only be wiped out.”

“I don’t know…” he finally admitted when pressed for an answer. His determination was more muddied than when he had first arrived. “I just…I don’t know.”

The General slid off the desk and straightened her regalia. “Take your time Captain; you have four years to think it through.”

On some invisible cue a pair of UNIT soldiers entered from a door behind her, a separate entrance from the one they had taken. Jack rose without having to be bidden to and approached them. With one last glance at the Sententia peacefully suffering in its tank, he let the soldiers silently guide him out of the room.

They brought him to a long line of holding cells not so unlike the cells Torchwood once had. There was also a single cot in the corner closest to him, a table and a chair in the corner opposite that. It was the least they could do, he supposed, if this is where he was going to live the next four years of his life.

The soldiers escorted him inside, removed his handcuffs, gave him a final pat down and then locked him inside.

Jack immediately slumped onto the noisy mattress.

Belatedly, he realized that he had missed yet another chance to escape. He could have overpowered those guards, stolen their guns, and seen how far going Rambo would have gotten him, but the idea of it gave him no peace. He wasn’t even really sure what he was fighting against anymore.

Jack lingered in that cell for a week before he gave in. They must have known what he would say all along.  _Damn them_ , Jack thought.

The Captain swung his legs over the mattress, walked to the small table and finished the lemonade they’d given him (the cheeky bastards). Then he pressed his face against the glass and called out to anyone that would listen.

“Hey!,” he cried, trying to attract the attention of a guard. There was usually always one within the berating range. “I want to talk to the General.” Minutes stretched by without any answer and he pressed his face against the glass in order to get a better look down the white, sterile hallway. “You can tell her I made my decision...Hey! Anybody there?”

There was a sudden commotion at the entrance to the cells, a series of voices and commands. Jack watched curiously as five UNIT soldiers dragged some unknown man down the hall, two of them supporting his weight. The hair on the back of Jack’s neck rose as he watched them come closer. He _knew_ that man draped between two red berets: it was Sam Winchester.

“Sam?!” Jack bellowed, throwing himself against the glass wall before him. “SAM!”

The soldiers paused, surprised by the Captain’s outburst. The prisoner between them stirred, looking up. Jack confirmed it was Sam, though blood was flowing down his nose, over his lips, and staining his shirt.

Sam smiled at the Captain and then he collapsed.


	13. Fighting My Way Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear this was not stolen from or inspired by Season 8 of SPN, I had this idea for Sam before I saw any of the "trials".

It was a hot day, the kind of day where the pavement gets so cooked everything more than ten feet away shimmers like a mirage. The shitty hotel Sam booked had recently updated their television sets but had overlooked fixing their air conditioning so Sam was stuck boiling to death, but at least he could watch other people enjoying themselves in high definition.

Maybe it was the temperature outside, or maybe it was his fever, but the heat brought back one particular memory of his brother and him. It was a night in July when he was still a kid. It was hot, just like this, and they hadn’t seen Dad for days. Sam vaguely remembered complaining about the heat, or Dad, or both; either way Dean had stormed out only to come back an hour later with a George Foreman and some raw burger patties. Apparently the tag ‘lean, mean, grilling machine’ had called out to Dean, so they threw the meat on the grill, opened a window, and pretended that they were outside on a patio in a home they could call their own.

It was a fond memory for him, but the image of the burger sizzling on the grill, its fat trickling down grooved slats was particularly relevant because that’s exactly how Sam felt right now: on fire, under pressure, and slowly being drained of his juices. The last Winchester sucked in a deep breath, the air in the room as suffocating as the dioxide expelled from his lungs.

  _It had never been this bad before_.

He’d followed Jack’s advice to leave town, packing up and driving 5 hours south. It was supposed to be his first night as a free man but instead Sam was plagued with a bout of nausea in the pit of his stomach. He dismissed it as nerves and got drunk.

Purchasing a bottle of cheap wine, he sat and watched reruns of the Twilight Zone, enjoying the fake drama of men in costume with cheaply designed props. He drank until the memories of Jack faded, just slightly, and somewhere between Rod Serling’s first and last utterance of “in the Twilight Zone” Sam had polished off the entire bottle. By the time I Love Lucy’s theme started playing, he was glued to the toilet for the rest of the night.

His second day of freedom was spent recovering from that hangover, but today was the worst yet. Every few hours Sam was overcome with the compulsory urge to retch, barely able to keep anything he ate or drank inside of him rather than inside the toilet. Consequently, he’d gotten progressively weaker and now he had a brutal fever.

His burning skin coupled with the oppressive heat made Sam wonder if he hadn’t finally joined Dean in Hell. He felt he deserved it, after all, more so than his brother. Because even if Jack was right, even if Sam wasn’t innately wrong, what he had _chosen_ to do…well, that couldn’t be as easily excused. That first drop of demon blood on his lips had opened Pandora’s Box and there was no going back.

Sam guessed he was suffering withdrawal from demon blood again.

So far the symptoms had been inconsequential. The Winchester brother would experience migraines or shaking hands, but it wasn’t a side-effect he couldn’t control. It wasn’t something that ever made him want to stop. Now it had been a month since he last drank Ruby’s blood, a month since he’d even thought about the next hit and Sam’s body was starting to shut down.

In the Captain’s presence Sam had fooled himself into thinking he was strong enough without it. Jack’s brilliance, his total absurdity and impossibility, had blinded Sam to that dark side of himself for a period of time. But once Jack left, that darkness had swallowed him whole and Sam knew, deep down, he wasn’t strong at all.

He had always depended on somebody to protect him, or to come save his ass when the going got tough: first Dean, then Ruby, then Jack. Now he was alone and as the days dragged on Sam’s sickness progressed, developing into violent fits of coughing while his other symptoms plateaued, neither worse nor better than the day before. Sam would go through cycles where his fever broke, only for it and the urge to retch to return hours later.

The first five days of his glorious “freedom” had been spent praying to a porcelain goddess, and Sam was starting to doubt he would ever get better. His efforts at dealing with the withdrawal by himself were failing spectacularly. He needed help.

Sam sat up in bed, peeling off the sheets that had adhered themselves to his sweat-soaked skin. He stumbled into the bathroom and leaned against the mirror to better study the effects of his withdrawal. With matted hair and bloodshot eyes, he hardly recognized the haunted face staring back at him. If another hunter came through that door right now would they shoot? If Dean could come back would he realize his little brother had been permanently damaged?

 Sam turned on the faucet and cupped his palms, splashing cold water onto his face to momentarily relieve the heat pressing in all around him.

Weighing his options, he thought about tracking down Ruby. She had always found Sam to suggest their latest demon hunt, so turning the tables and trying to hunt her down might prove to be difficult. Of course barring that he could find another demon and suck them dry, and then maybe this sickness would stop plaguing him long enough to allow him to think straight.

Funnily enough, even though he was suffering from withdrawal, the idea of guzzling gallons of demon blood still disgusted him. Sam’s stomach flipped at the thought and his face slowly turned green until he gagged, dry heaving over the sink and devolving into a series of spasmodic coughs.  In the last sputter of his lungs, Sam felt something wet jettison from the back of his throat. He spit into the sink and wiped his mouth dry. When he saw what it was, his heart sank. It was blood, black blood, like the blood he had seen in the badlands, or the goo that spilled out from the green-eyed demon. The last Winchester brother stared at the familiar sight with horrifying recognition.

Okay, so…maybe this _wasn’t_ your normal, run-of-the-mill demon blood withdrawal.

Sam all but ran out of the bathroom, his head spinning. He reached his desk and fell into the chair trying to calm the panic that was building in the back of his mind. This _couldn’t_ be the same thing Jack and him had seen before. For one, he wasn’t a freaking demon, and secondly the few cases they’d witnessed, and all the cases Sam had studied, had transpired over a few hours. Sam had been like this for days. But his nausea, his fever, it was all as if his body was trying to cleanse itself of something but it couldn’t figure out what.

 _Of course_ , Sam thought bitterly, _I can’t even get sick properly._

Perhaps he should have been happy that some mysterious sickness was trying to purrify him. But from what he’d observed before, the demons weren’t just expelled from the body, they were killed. Sam had demon blood in him. That didn’t make him a demon, but if Jack was right all along, and this sickness was designed to kill, then Sam doubted it could make that distinction.

If this was the same thing Jack and him had encountered, then it was very likely a part of him was slowly dying. A part of him, or all of him, Sam wasn’t going to sit around and find out. He had to find Jack. Of course Captain Jack was on the other side of the US in a western-style standoff with UNIT and even _that_ information was four days old. Still, it was the best lead he had, so Sam opened up his laptop and started to search with a fevered brow and sweating hands, as if his life depended on it, because it probably did.

His first dig into UNIT wasn’t very successful. On the United Nations website there was some vague description of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce under the International Law subcategory. It defined UNIT as a military organization working for the defense and the common good of all nations, and that their headquarters were located in the UK. That was it.

But there were other ways to find out more about them. Every organization, no matter how top secret, had to have a paper trail, so Sam followed the money.

The UN’s military defense budget was less inflated than the US’s but they still allocated a good chunk of change to UNIT with the same “common good of all nations” jargon they’d listed on the website. UNIT in turn divided that money between three countries: England, Germany, and the US. In the US the funds were solely concentrated on a military base in northern New York.

These funds from the UN covered New York’s operating expenses, but when Sam looked at the numbers more closely he saw large allocations of money were being sent to three different places along the east coast (Maine, New Jersey, South Carolina), and two locations on the west coast (Washington, California).  Each location was tenebrously named after certain ‘projects’ such as Project Osterhagen 2, Project Sontaran Stratagem Defense, and Project MALI.

Curious, Sam compared the money going out with the money coming in. UNIT should have been operating in the red, billions of dollars in debt, but they weren’t, which meant someone other than the UN was funding them. It would have been normal to find grants, some private donations, and a subsidy or two from the US for defense to explain the gap but Sam didn’t find any of those.

What he found instead was a large sum listed as a “donation” from Osato Pharmaceuticals. Sam paused, because he’d come across that name before in relation to UNIT, in his very first investigation. When green-eyes was smashing trucks on the highway Sam had looked up whose property was being targeted: it was Osato.

Osato was a part of Big Drug, a small handful of companies that had gotten rich across the US from creating monopolies for certain every-day needs like ibuprofen or allergy prescriptions, making less and charging more. They’d recently been embroiled in a health care scandal over a very new, apparently effective cure for certain types of aggressive skin cancer. They were upcharging over 500% of what it cost to make the drug, selling it only to select specialist hospitals (ironically often non-profit) that would then upsell it to the patient at another 300%. A handful of human-rights activists had discovered this shady business, and considering the life-saving potential of the drug, deemed Osato’s obvious exclusion of the poor inhumane.

Sam had dismissed the drug company at first because he was looking for a deeper connection and he had no reason to believe a demon would randomly start trying to destroy drug shipments unless they had some personal vendetta against Flinstone-shaped vitamins. But now it looked as if Osato and UNIT were more like bedfellows than partners. If UNIT was making a cure against demons was it possible Osato would pull the same stunt they had with the cancer drug, patenting it and marking it up for an insane profit? And if the green-eyed demon had been focused on those shipments, did it know this was happening the whole time?

The information on the screen before him started to get scrambled and blurred. Sam blinked his eyes and shut the laptop.

If any of this was true then he had been blind to the bigger monster at work here, but Sam didn’t have time for guilt, or for drowning in it. It might be too late to find Jack, or even to save himself, but Sam had to hope that somehow this could still be set right. Hope was the only thing he had right now.

His fever had broken for a moment so Sam grabbed a flannel shirt and shrugged it over his shoulders. If Jack was out on the east coast, he could be in either one of those three locations, and even if he narrowed it down Sam knew he would need help getting into UNIT long enough to find him. The younger Winchester brother started to form a plan, but it would take an old friend’s know-how to pull it off.

Sam sighed, stuffing a few possessions into his spare duffle bag. He hadn’t contacted Bobby since his brother died; hell he’d practically up and disappeared. Blundering onto Bobby’s stoop like a prodigal son and asking for a favor was bound to get him a smack over the head and a long lecture on how to use a phone to keep in touch, but in the end he knew Bobby would help.

Sam finished packing his things, checked out of the motel and dumped his bag and laptop into the passenger seat of the Impala. While rehearsing a series of unconvincing excuses in his head, Sam opened the glove compartment in the car and grabbed his cellphone. As he pulled it out and up to his ear it broke in half.

Sam stared dumbly at the receiver in his hand and the other half of his phone near the gas pedal. Turning the plastic over he scanned the exposed motherboard, wondering what the hell had happened. There was something missing from the maze of soldered microchips but it would take too long for him to figure out what it was, and time was something he didn’t have. Back tracking his own timeline Sam guessed he hadn’t actually used his phone since before Jack left which meant the obvious culprit was…

“Shit,” Sam growled, ignited with a sudden idea. He tossed the phone aside and dragged out his laptop, pulling up the website that allowed him to track its gps. The last signal came from Fort Hancock, New Jersey. Sam stared at the screen, incredulous. Jack couldn’t possibly have known that he was going to change his mind in the end…could he?

“You crazy idiot…” Sam grinned, touched that Jack had always hoped he would come. It was a refreshing feeling.

Shutting the laptop and digging out a handful of change, Sam leapt out of the car and poured a few quarters into the phone booth across the parking lot. He hesitated for a moment, his fingers hovering over the well-worn silver buttons. Finally he punched in a familiar number and held his breath as the line began to ring.

When he heard the answer on the other end Sam smiled sadly at the voice, tired, drained, a lot like him. “Bobby?” he asked. “Uh hey. It’s Sam.”

“I know who it is, idjit,” came the predictably cranky reply. “Boy I’d nearly given you up for dead. Where the _hell_ have you been?”

“Around,” Sam answered vaguely. “Listen, Bobby, I have to ask you for a favor but I don’t really have a lot of time to explain. I kind of need you to just trust me on this one okay?”

“Let me get this straight,” Bobby grunted. “You darn well near disappear on me, actively avoid my attempts to reach out to you, and then call out of the blue expecting _favors_?”

Sam hung his head in penitence. “Yeah,” he said quietly. "Sorry."

There was a long pause where Sam waited. He was truly sorry to have kept Bobby in the dark but he couldn’t bear to share what he had been doing. And he also didn’t want to be stopped.

Finally Bobby spoke and it was obvious that he was always going to help. “What else is family for?” the old hunter concluded.

Sam smiled appreciatively, running a hand through his fever-soaked hair.

“So what’s this favor you need so damn bad you gotta crawl back to _me_ for it?” Bobby asked.

The last Winchester stared through the glass walls of the phone booth, to the Impala whose headlights were cutting through the approaching dusk. He started to unravel the plan in his head. “Bobby. Dad was in the Marine Corps, right?”

~~

The Sandy Hook Lighthouse is the oldest lighthouse in the US and it sits about one and a half miles from the tip of Sandy Hook in northern New Jersey. It’s a quaint piece of history for tourists visiting the sleepy strip of beach in the summer season. At over 100 feet tall you can see out into Sandy Hook Bay, and on a clear day even the shore of the Atlantic Highlands. You can also see Fort Hancock.

This former US Army fort is another piece of history that tourists used to visit but it’s been closed for over a year now. It’s said that the batteries are being restored but there’s never any obvious construction going on. Once a day, however, an inconspicuous green jeep drives into the heart of the preserve with a handful of soldiers in the back. It goes somewhere nobody can see and nobody can follow, but at some point later in the day it drives back out of the preserve, empty.

Sam was now sitting in the back of one of these jeeps, destined for the closed preserve. He was accompanied by three other uniformed soldiers who bounced along with him down a gravel road lined with green trees. The vehicle jerked as they hit a pot hole and Sam reached to steady the red UNIT cap on his head, his hair tucked neatly inside.

The jeep slowed as it approached the preserve, passing through some gates that had been erected to keep out unwanted tourists while the batteries were supposedly being repaired. Sam had expected to see some kind of compound with troops of UNIT soldiers practicing drills but instead there was nothing but calm, peaceful stretches of grass and trees and even some colonial houses in the distance.

The woman in uniform next to Sam noted his curiosity with a smile. She had long black hair pulled back behind her head and her uniform was slightly different from everyone else in the jeep. He guessed she outranked them. “They bring in soldiers like us every day,” she observed as their jeep crept past the gates and started to pick up speed again. “They’ve upped security ever since they arrested the Captain. Good thing too,” she added, lowering her voice as a comment directed mostly at herself. “Wherever that man goes disaster follows.”

Sam turned to regard her dubiously as the jeep paused at an intersection and then turned right. “ _The_ Captain?”

“The immortal man,” the soldier across from them jumped in. “Stuff of legends,” he chuckled. “They say he’s been around since the dawn of time.”

“I hear he’s not even a man at all,” the woman added.

Sam quirked a brow as the conjectures escalated, wondering if they could possibly be talking about the same person.

The third soldier, a broad-shouldered black man sitting across from Sam who had been silent the whole ride suddenly glanced at them in interest when the subject of the Captain came up. “I heard he was hot,” he grunted with a deep, gravel-like voice. Then he went right back to ignoring them.

Sam smiled involuntarily; now there was no doubt they were talking about Captain Jack Harkness. “What did he get arrested for, exactly?” he fished.

That question earned him a pointed stare from everyone in the vehicle as if it was common knowledge. Sam was already sweating under his collar, so he shrugged and just played dumb.

“He didn’t follow orders,” the woman next to him finally said. “And he got one of us killed.” The tension in the jeep was pulled tight like a piano wire, and when she spoke a final time it resonated deeply. “I knew her too, she was like family.”

It could have been Sam’s father lecturing him in the back of that UNIT jeep. The last Winchester felt a sting of deep regret that his idiocy and lack of foresight had not only gotten that young woman killed, it had landed the fault on Jack. If only he _had_ been a better soldier like his dad wanted, like Dean was, maybe he could have saved that Private; maybe he wouldn’t have abandoned Jack out of selfishness, and maybe there wouldn’t be something trying to kill him from the inside out.

Or maybe he would have been dead a long damn time ago.

The troop remained silent until their vehicle pulled over in front of the overgrown ruins of a WWI battery and they were asked to file out. Sam watched carefully as the driver punched in a code to a small handheld device and then the military compound that he’d originally expected to see suddenly appeared before him.

Sam gaped in silent awe as the public’s image of Fort Hancock disappeared.

Scrambling over his knowledge of lore, the hunter tried to make sense of what he was seeing while simultaneously being barked at to march forward. He thought over spells, and witchcraft, and ancient rituals but there wasn’t anything in his banks of obscure knowledge that could explain a full blown illusion on such a massive scale. This wasn’t anything home-grown, he concluded, this was alien.

Sam was marching straight into the heart of a military compound that had decades of experience using and incorporating technology from across the stars. This was literally a world of knowledge far and beyond anything Sam had ever encountered, and for the first time he realized he might be in way over his head. 

They were lined outside of another gate, this time with heavy cement walls topped with barbed wire. Sam observed the other soldiers removing small id cards from various pockets. Sam followed their example, a small flurry of panic building in the back of his head and in the pit of his stomach.

A guard in a small tower to the right of the gate stepped out to meet them, holding out a portable scanner. He glanced at them and grunted “name, rank, and card.”

The young black man sitting across from Sam was first to comply. He handed over his card and saluted, staring straight ahead. “Private Mattias Roy, sir,” he announced. The soldier at the gate scanned his card, and a small green light appeared. He was approved.

The man who’d conjectured Jack was immortal was next. “Corporal Alex Reiner, sir,” he stated. He was also scanned and approved.

“Sergeant Luzia Honor, sir,” the woman beside Sam announced. She was scanned and approved.

The soldier from the tower nodded at Sergeant Luzia’s approval and eyed Sam expectantly. Sam handed over his card as well, hoping no one could see his sweaty palms.

“Corporal John Winchester,” Sam said, and then after a beat he added, “sir.”

Bobby wasn’t happy with this crackpot plan of his, and he never wasted an opportunity to tell him so. “Boy, this is by far the _dumbest i_ dea I’ve heard in a long time,” he chided.  “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one!”

Sam shrugged off the concern disguised in the old hunter’s voice. “Sorry Bobby. I guess I’ve been kind of stupid lately.”

“Damn right you have,” he grunted. “You look like death warmed over. They’re going to take one look at you and kick your sorry ass back to wherever you came from. Or worse!”

“I only need this cover for getting inside,” Sam dismissed, wiping a hand across his fevered brow. “I can suck it up until then.”

Bobby sighed and sat across from him, knowing it was useless to reason. That damn Winchester stubbornness never got any weaker through the generations. “You know Sam, some days you sound exactly like your daddy.”

Sam stopped what he was doing, a small 1”x 1.5” photo of himself next to a UNIT badge they were faking. “Good,” he concluded with a tight smile. “Because I’m about to become him.”

After leaving active duty, Corporal John Winchester was still a part of the Individual Ready Reserve forces for the United States Marine Corps, a reserve unit composed of marines whose names were on record to be called upon in war or other emergencies. Soldiers recruited to UNIT were from a variety of different departments for national defense. At first a majority of them came from across the Atlantic, and then from active members with the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. Over the past few years, however, more members were being called from the reserves.

When their mother had gone up in flames John Winchester had packed up what was left of their family and fought a different kind of war, one closer to home than he’d ever imagined. He’d taught his sons how to fight like soldiers, or tried to with Sam at least. Today he was completing the circuit and literally becoming Corporal John Winchester.

Would dad be proud? He didn’t know, and frankly Sam didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, this was the most useful thing his father had ever given him.

Using John’s past history in the Marine Corps as a basic template, they altered a few details to fit Sam, like his picture and his birthdate. Then they dumped his subsumed identity into a database of new recruits being transferred from New York to New Jersey the day after next.

Bobby had helped him pull together what he needed for a fake id and drilled him on some basic marine knowledge. Sam had to knock out some poor kid to steal his uniform, but so far roleplaying had gotten him here: past some kind of invisible barrier and at the gates of Project MALI. Now his admittance depended on that id. And that’s all he needed, Sam told himself, _was to get inside_.

When the light turned green Sam practically melted: he’d been approved.

“Final security check,” the guard announced suddenly, cutting off Sam’s reverie. He switched out his scanner for a small flask and handed it to Sam who stared at it dumbly. “ _Drink_ ,” the guard commanded.

When Sam realized what it was, he had to fight back a grin. UNIT had technology from other worlds but they were still using holy water to test for demons?

He raised the flask with a cheeky grin and nodded. “Bottoms up,” he said, and then Sam took a swig: at least this was one test he didn’t have to worry about. When Sam was done he wiped his lips and handed it to the Sergeant standing next to him, but just as he did another wave of nausea hit him like kick in the gut. He dropped the flask and the contents spilled out over the dirt at his feet.

The Winchester brother tried to fight the sickness as he’d done all afternoon, well aware that he’d suddenly attracted the attention of every soldier around him, but the pain was too intense. His resolve crumbled and he fell into a violent fit of coughing. Sam recognized the blood he’d spit up at the same time he heard the sound of hands reaching for guns.

His cover blown, Sam was already a condemned man.

The guard tower placed a hand on his headset and said “MALI”, then all hell broke loose. There was shouting and panic as dozens of guns were pointed at his head. The Sergeant standing next to him jumped into action and elbowed him sharply in the face, kicking his legs out from underneath him.

Sam crumpled like a rag doll and he didn’t even bother to try and fight when he was eventually handcuffed and dragged to his feet.

Captain Sterling had been called to the skirmish and when the situation was finally subdued he studied Sam quietly before delivering his prognosis. “He’s infected, beginning stages. Take him to the cells and let him sweat it out.”

“I’m not a demon!” Sam growled, uselessly pulling against the metal and the hands that restrained him. “Okay? I’m not infected with anything. I’m human!”

Sterling eyed him suspiciously and glanced at the tower guard for confirmation. The soldier appeared conflicted. “He willingly drank the water, sir. And there were no tell-tale signs of burning...”

“The evidence is undeniable,” the Captain concluded. He reached out to wipe the corners of Sam’s mouth, showing him the black blood on the tip of his finger. “You’ve got MALI in your blood, my friend. But don’t worry, in a few hours you’ll be 100% human again.”

Sam was gripped by an indescribable fear as he was permitted into UNIT’s compound, only to be dragged into their cells.

 


	14. Die Hard the Hunter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who are sensitive to the subject matter, this chapter contains mentions of suicide.

The world was spinning, rocking on its axis like a carnival ride and Sam felt he was clinging to the railings in a desperate attempt not to fall off. In reality he was lying very still on a cold, cement floor with a splitting headache.

He was greeted with a pair of blinding incandescent lights when he awoke, humming above him in a monotonous drone. Sam pushed himself upright, spotting dabs of blood on his hands and recognizing the taste in his mouth. The memory of his failed attempt to infiltrate UNIT came rushing back along with a wave of nausea he was too weak to fight. He was helpless as the urge to wretch rolled over him, his body trying to force something out that wasn’t there, but eventually it passed and Sam collapsed back onto the floor, sucking in air with eager gasps.

Distantly, he heard his name. Summoning what strength he had left, Sam made a second attempt to sit up and gather his bearings.

He was in a 4’x8’ cell with cement floors and three cement walls. The fourth wall was of Plexiglas, stretching from end to end and floor to ceiling like something straight out of _Silence of the Lambs_. Sam peered through the glass, out into the hallway and into the cells across from him but everything was empty. He was beginning to doubt he’d heard anything when the voice came again: “Sam, are you awake?”

This time he recognized it. “ _Jack_?” the hunter asked, pressing his face to the glass in hopes of catching at least a fleeting glimpse of the Captain.

“Right here,” Jack confirmed, “one cage over.”

Sam sat back with a sigh, melting into the concrete around him in an overwhelming moment of relief. “Thank god,” he croaked, wishing he could corroborate Jack’s existence by seeing him, but right now his words were comfort enough. 

“I doubt god had anything to do with it,” Jack quipped. “Unless putting you in that uniform was some kind of divine intervention.”

Sam smiled. Out of all the things the Captain could have said to reassure him, it was that petulant arrogance of his that allowed Sam to relax. Jack always joked in the face of danger but he was particularly grateful for it this time around. They were in a shit load of trouble, captured and held hostage by UNIT while Sam was wasting away by the minute, and a sense of humor was the only thing that kept him from unraveling.

“This thing’s less divine than it is desperate,” the hunter explained, idly stroking the winged patch sewn onto his confiscated uniform and over his heart.

“Still looks good,” Jack concluded. “But I think after all of this I may never fantasize about that uniform or that _hat_ ever again.”

“This is a dark day indeed,” Sam joked.

Without acknowledging his opponent’s parry, Jack thrust on ahead. “By the way I like this rescue plan of yours. Does it actually involve any rescuing?”

“No,” Sam countered dryly, “I just love playing dress-up.”

If the Captain had also been performing his own litmus test to see whether Sam was alright, then Sam appeared to have passed. Jack laid down his arms and chuckled, low and warm, the sound wrapping around Sam like a friendly embrace through the walls that separated them.

“I take it you got my signal?” Jack finally asked, jumping straight to business now that his affectionate goading was over. “I implanted that chip of yours into my manipulator on the off chance someone would track it, but I was worried the transmission was cut short when UNIT confiscated my wrist strap.”

“I got it,” Sam confirmed. “At first I didn’t know why you’d be in New Jersey, but then I found out UNIT’s been branching out all along the east coast. I guess this location is for the development of Project MALI, whatever that means.”

“It’s their pet name for demons: Mali Contagium,” Jack explained, “and Project MALI is the virus created to destroy them. I had a special tour before they threw me in here and I saw the alien they’re using to produce the virus. It’s called a Sententia. Naturally they’re gentle creatures but something happened to it, now it’s a toxin factory and UNIT’s used that to their advantage, tricking it into creating this virus that acts like a supernatural antibody. Once it’s in the blood, it filters out the demon that’s invaded and dumps the waste into the stomach where it…you know. In a way, it’s kind of efficient, if you’re into projectile vomiting.”

It had been hard enough to scrub out the image of green eyes puking his guts out at their feet, but now that Jack was singing his praise for the bizarr-o design of a manufactured virus. “Yeah,” Sam strained, “ _efficient_.”

“But too unstable,” the Captain continued. “UNIT put all of their trust into this Sententia to kill what _they_ told it to. Any anomaly could cause it to mutate, and then there’s no telling what kind of danger we’d be in.”

“Anomaly?” Sam asked hesitantly.

“Yeah. I’m not sure what it would take, but I do know when you gamble with something you don’t understand it has a nasty way of coming back and biting you in the ass.”

The information was like a knife twisting further into Sam’s gut but he continued to avoid mentioning the thing in him, pushing his insides out. Faced with a much larger problem, he didn’t see any point adding to the misery. “So what do we have to do, Jack, if they’ve already infected the Northwest with this thing?”

“That Sententia is the key to this,” the Captain advised. “Every virus that’s in somebody is telepathically connected to the alien that made it. It creates them, it directs them to kill.”

“So shutting down the factory kind of cuts off the message,” Sam reasoned. “No more directions to kill, no more killing?”

“It’s not as simple as that. Just killing the Sententia won’t stop that virus from continuing. The only thing that’s going to stop it is a directive from the alien itself. So I need to talk to it but even that’s going to be tricky, cause this thing’s completely non-verbal, but I think if I have enough time I can manage a connection.”

“So basically you’ve got to change its mind?” Sam asked with a derisive snort. “No offense Jack but what are you going to say: Stop In The Name Of Love?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a jaunty show tune, myself." Jack said cheekily. "First thing’s first though, we’ve got to get out of here. How are you feeling?”

“Never been better,” Sam smiled feebly. He had been lying limply against the wall that separated him from the Captain, his legs stretched out lithely before him and his feet beginning to tingle from a slight numbness. He could hear his heart beating, pumping this disease through every inch of him.

“You’re sick,” Jack noted: simple, quiet. Sam frowned, unable to read the Captain’s emotion through a foot of cement, but for the first time he realized that Jack might have known there was something wrong from the start.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sam muttered. “It doesn’t change what has to be done.” It was his fault for ending up like this anyways, he thought; his fault for being a freak, his fault for staying behind. So Sam dismissed the concern, refusing to let his pain draw their focus from the big picture.

“Do you remember when I sat you down and pointed to the sky,” Jack asked suddenly, solemnly. “I told you about the galaxies I’ve been to, the beautiful sights I’ve seen? Well none of that matters. This little rock is what matters, the people here, people like you. You matter Sam. You matter _so_ much."

Sam did remember. That night was the night Sam wanted Jack to stay with him as a hunter, and when Jack had decided to leave and not be a hunter that was the night Sam wanted to kiss him. And now, if he could, he would kiss him again. Of course Jack was wrong, he wasn’t special or unique, he wasn’t a hero, he wasn’t brave, and he certainly wasn’t more important than the rest of the world. But for a moment Jack was egocentric enough to think that he was, and Sam could kiss him for that.

“I’m infected with their virus,” he finally admitted. “It took me awhile to connect the dots but then I started spitting up blood. That’s why this whole UNIT charade of mine fell apart. They had me drink holy water and it was like someone punched me in the gut. I’m not possessed and I’m not a demon, but it still thinks something’s wrong with me, only it can’t figure out what. I can feel it Jack, grinding me up, tearing me apart.”

“How is that even possible?” Jack protested. “You were never inoculated. It’s not in your blood, you _can’t_ be sick.”

Sam laughed, a short bark of amusement that still rattled around in his skull once he was done with it. “Sorry Jack…I haven’t been very honest with you.” He grimaced, thinking over the admission he was about to make. He doubted the Captain would feel the same way about him after he’d heard it, which meant Sam might not ever get that kiss he craved, but he decided to continue anyway. He owed it to Jack.

“The night you left you didn’t collapse, you were possessed by Ruby. I didn’t know at first but she tricked me into kissing you and there was this cut on your lip. I remember tasting your blood, her blood at that point. I think she knew I didn’t want to stop this thing, so what better way to make me care then to infect me, right?” Sam examined his hands, cut and bruised, stained red. His wrists were still scarred from his near escape from the hospital a month earlier. He knew in time that they would heal, but he didn’t know if he even had that much time. “I can’t believe I trusted her,” he mused softly.

“Not to jump to the defense of your demon girlfriend,” Jack cut in, skirting over Sam’s regret with the same business-only tone he’d used to describe the Sententia.  “But it wasn’t her that poisoned you. It was me. Before UNIT sent me to Montana they made me ingest that stuff, not that I knew until recently. I’ve died a couple of times since then, so there’s no telling how that may have altered the virus but maybe it can explain why the effects are slowed down in your case. Which is…good. It buys us more time.”

Sam turned and stared through the wall, straining to make sense of that last cryptic sentence. “What do you mean?” However the wall, like Jack, was impenetrable, unreadable, and silent. “ _Jack_ ,” he pressed anxiously. “If you’re hiding something from me don’t pretend like you’re doing it for my benefit.”

Jack cleared his throat and it scared Sam, because when he started to speak again the hunter could hear, clearly this time, the fear the Captain was trying to repress. “You have demon blood in you, but you’re human. You only have part of what this thing is looking to kill and in that way you’re right, it is confused. But remember what I said about it mutating before? It’s going to think that you’re the demon, all of you, and it’s going to alter itself until it figures out how to kill a human.”

Sam shook his head gently. “I sort of…already knew that I was dying, Jack.”

“It gets worse." Jack said darkly. "I told you this virus doesn’t work on its own, and now it’s going to relay what it knows about killing humans to the Sententia and then that pattern’s going to get sent to every other virus and when that happens those who have been inoculated with this thing are gonna drop like flies.”

Sam’s blood ran cold, but it wasn’t painful enough to kill the thing inside or even merciful enough to kill _him_. The world stopped for a moment but he just kept chugging along while the deaths of hundreds of people were brewing in his blood. It horrified Sam, but didn’t actually surprise him because ever since he was young he’d known, somehow, that he was wrong. He tried so hard to redeem himself from this thing inside of him but no matter what he did, it seemed like he was destined to end up causing more harm than good, whether he wanted to or not.

“It has to figure out how to kill me first,” Sam said carefully. “Maybe if I jumped the gun, it wouldn’t have the chance?”

“What?!” Jack’s confusion was so blunt it made Sam’s skin jump.

“I’m not afraid to die,” Sam explained, “but you can’t ask me to sit here and be the tool for this thing’s mechanics. _I don’t want to be that kind of monster._ ”

“You’re _not_ a monster Sam," Jack protested. "…you’re not. Don’t think like that. It’s not even that bad, we can still stop this. _Please_ give me a _chance_ to stop this.”

Sam wanted to yell at the Captain, tell him to stop. He wasn’t thinking rationally. The Captain didn’t know enough about him to think he was worth saving, but he knew enough about to understand the man would never stop trying.

“What are you going to do?” Sam finally relented.

“Let me to talk to General Erisa,” Jack implored. “When she thinks I’m helping UNIT then I can get close to the Sententia.”

“You’re going to talk to the Sententia and change its mind _and_ you’re going to talk the General into letting you see it. You think very highly of your powers of persuasion don’t you?” Sam mused.

“In the General’s case she’s actually offered me a truce, of sorts," Jack explained. "As long as she thinks I’m helping her I can move around freely, or at least more freely than I am right now. And maybe I can even get some medical help for you while I--”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Sam interrupted.

Jack chuckled. “I’ve been playing double agent since before you were born. Well, actually thirty centuries after you were born, but that’s where it gets complicated. The point is I have to play along until I can figure out how to stop this thing.”

“But aren’t you two, like, sworn enemies?”

“I’d be more comfortable if that’s how she felt,” the Captain admitted grimly. “As it stands Torchwood and UNIT are on the same side but I don’t know if we’re heading towards the same ending.”

“Torchwood,” Sam repeated, tasting the word on his lips for himself. Whatever it meant, it was the one thing that drove Jack. “You never did tell me what that was.”

“ _I’m_ Torchwood,” Jack declared without hesitation.

Sam laughed. “Because _that_ clears it up.”

He could hear the Captain’s feet scuffing against the cement, adjusting himself as he adjusted his approach to the question. “It used to be an organization dedicated to destroying a very good friend of mine,” Jack began again. “When I took ahold of the branch in Cardiff I rebuilt it in his honor. I don’t have a branch anymore, or a headquarters, or even much of a team but I still have everything _he_ stood for. I’d like to think that’s what Torchwood is, that it's some kind of hope that tomorrow will be better. That’s what my friend meant to me, at least.”

Under the bright fluorescent lights of his cell Sam felt naked, exposed, bared open even though he wasn’t the one sharing his heart. He wished his own motives were that pure, felt that at one point they might have been until he’d become consumed with revenge.

After a moment Jack chimed in again, quietly. “This…isn’t the best time to ask if you enjoyed that kiss of ours, is it?”

Sam closed his eyes and smiled. “Probably not.”

~~~

Captain Jack was solemnly escorted across the grounds of Fort Hancock, four pairs of red caps silently flanking him on either side. What had once been the location of Battery Peck, a part of the main gun line, had been razed and a new building put in its place surrounded by barracks, a shooting range, and a lengthy obstacle course. Thanks to the shimmer, an invisible shield that altered the appearance from the outside, anybody studying google maps would be none the wiser.

His guards marched him towards the center of a green field where Jack could already see General Erisa waiting for him. In the distance the shooting range and obstacle course were already occupied, harsh whistles being blown at arbitrary intervals when certain standards of physique weren’t being met. It was a purposefully conspicuous display of power that, frankly, Jack was growing tired of.

As he neared the General a squad of soldiers jogged past them in formation and a young woman with long black hair tied behind her head caught his eye. She was staring at him so intently she’d started to fall out of step with the others. He noted her uniform, slightly different from the others, and guessed she was a sergeant. As their paths crossed Jack winked and the woman frowned, jerking her head away from him and merging back into the synchronic mass. Captain Jack idly watched her and the squad until General Erisa stepped forward to greet him.

“Captain,” she said sternly. “You wished to speak with me. I hope it concerns our last discussion.”

His guards stepped back, forming two semi circles on either side of them. They had not handcuffed him this time, so Jack was free to fold his arms across his chest in a small display of spite. “I just thought I’d comment on the nice weather we’ve been having. Do you know if they’re forecasting rain later because I’m in a ‘running down the beach naked’ kind of mood. Figured I’d take a couple of your boys down to the shore. Don’t expect us home till after dinner.”

Jack smirked, but the General maintained her calm. "I see solitary confinement hasn’t diminished your good spirits, Captain.”

Jack’s smile slowly waned. “Give it time.”

If her emotions had begun to boil over, the General was quick to subdue them, shifting tectonic plates of armor until they fell back into the correct formation. “I realize I led you to believe that expediency wasn’t a priority, Captain, but if you would allow me to be blunt: Have you a made decision yet?”

“I have,” Jack confirmed, “on one condition.”

The General narrowed her eyes and considered this. “Which is?”

“You brought in a man yesterday by the name of--”

“John Winchester,” she finished. “Yes I was informed of his infection; his system should be clear by now. What is your condition regarding him?”

Jack hesitated briefly at the mix-match in names. “It’s _not_ cleared up,” he corrected. “Your virus isn’t reacting the way it should, and you can’t blame this one on demon side effects because he’s not even possessed.”

“Captain I assure you the virus only works when--”

“Save it okay? You’re wrong, and you’re about to find out how wrong, so here’s my condition: I want your best medical team on this _pronto_ and if anything happens to this kid I don’t care if you lock me in a cage for three years and wipe my memory I _will_ find you, I will stop you, and I will tear UNIT out from underneath you.”

“Captain you’re aware that you’re in no position to bargain, let alone _threaten._ ”

Jack stepped forward, nose-to-nose with General Erisa which triggered the shuffle of fingers seeking triggers all around. “ _Try me_ ,” he growled.

The General studied him from head to toe, from left ear to right ear, and found him at least worth humoring. She nodded, though the soldiers around them refused to relax, and neither did Jack.

“That’s a curious condition, Captain. This boy, is he a friend of yours, a lover, a companion?”

The Doctor’s terminology visibly stung Jack, just as she intended. “He’s about to become your number one problem,” Jack insisted quietly. “Because that virus inside of him is going to change from a demon-killing weapon, to a human-killing weapon. That’ll be your claim to fame, General. And remember what I said before, about pointing to the hat?” Jack turned suddenly and snatched a cap off the nearest soldier. “Everyone’s going to know this was UNIT’s fault.”

General Erisa stared reflectively at the hat in his hands. “That’s quiet the accusation you’ve just made.”

“It’s the truth,” Jack insisted, tossing the hat aside, ignoring the soldier who had to go play fetch. “But I _can_ help; let me talk to the Sententia. I can try and reverse the effects.”

“We’re well aware of how the alien works,” General Erisa snapped. “And reversal in this case means a stop to everything we’ve worked so hard for. One inconsistency _cannot_ bring this entire project to its knees.”

“You don’t have a choice anymore!” Jack growled. “You played with fire, now stop it before we all get burned!”

The General’s chest swelled with rebuffed pride. She shook her head and turned away from him. “I disagree.” She retreated just outside the circle of soldiers, and just as Jack was about to tell her tough cookies, she waved her hand and four pairs of arms lunged forward to restrain him. To the other four soldiers she said “Find the young man in question, bring him to the med bay and eliminate him.”

“No!” Jack shouted, struggling against the hands that held him like a vice. “Stop! You wanted my help General, and this isn’t the way to get it!”

General Erisa studied him with a predatory quirk of her head. “Wanted? Yes. Needed? Hardly. This has merely been an exercise in eliminating redundancies.”

Jack watched helplessly as two pairs of UNIT executioners withdrew to find Sam.

“Torchwood,” the General continue to explain. “If it cannot be categorized as a proactive ally, then it is _unnecessary_. And quite honestly, Captain, it has been for some time.”

Jack glared at her with tear-brimmed eyes. “You never planned on restoring Torchwood did you?”

The General smiled and it unnerved him to the core. “It’s rumored that your allegiance to Torchwood started as coercion. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen again, but with us?”

~~~~

UNIT intercepted their target in cell 6B while he was standing atop a chair with a bedsheet, looped and knotted at one end, hanging around his neck. They removed the noose and pulled the target from the chair. The target appeared to be very sick so they met with minimal resistance. His extraction from the cell was uneventful, except for his initial outburst wherein the target shouted: “You idiots, I was saving you the hassle!”


	15. I'm the One

Captain Jack Harkness had fought in more wars than he cared to remember.

He grew up under the constant threat of invasion from some wicked, malicious alien race. They murdered his father and kidnapped his brother, torturing his brother for years until he became just as twisted as they were. It wasn’t until Jack joined the Time Agency that he learned more about that race. The creatures that destroyed his family were caught up in a larger war at home. They invaded planets in search of raw materials and slaves, all in the name of their own defense.

His planet, he found out, had just been a pit stop on the way back home for them.

When he left the Time Agency and went rogue he used Earth’s World Wars as a cover, selling alien junk at inflated prices, assuming no one would notice him while they were too busy killing each other. Then he got stuck on Earth and he lived through those wars again. Now it was the 21st century and modern warfare had evolved in an increasingly sinister way.

Still reeling from the aftermath of the last World War, its carnage, destruction, and death toll, Earth’s superpowers were less likely to declare all-out war with one another. Instead their struggle took place quietly, politically, chemically, but no less dangerously. In times of peace humanity still kept thinking about war but now it was called defense. Nuclear warheads, unmanned drones, these were all created in the name of defense.

Torchwood One had murdered the retreating Sycorax in the name of defense, and UNIT had created the Osterhagen Project. Now the only thing left of Torchwood was Captain Jack himself, and here was UNIT with yet another dubious weapon of mass defense. Project MALI was the key to saving the human race from some kind of inevitable demon doomsday. It was supposed to save more than it would harm, and that was why General Erisa had to strap Sam Winchester to a gurney and kill him.

After the confrontation in the training yard Captain Jack was marched inside and stuffed into a small white room with ten other soldiers and General Erisa. Adjacent to them was a med bay. There was a door joining the two rooms and a pane of one-way glass stretching from it to the other side of the wall. Through the glass he could see Sam lying on a gurney that had been turned into an impromptu lethal injection table. The hunter was staring calmly at the ceiling as one man in a white lab coat tightened straps around his arms, legs, and waist. Once Sam erupted into a fit of sputtering coughs and the doctor stood by dumbly, only placing his hand on the man’s shoulder to keep him lying down. When the fit had passed the doctor wiped some blood from the hunter’s nose and went back to tightening his straps.

Sam looked totally resigned to his fate and the shock of it ran up and down Jack’s spine, leaving his fingers and toes numb. He remembered the conversation they’d had in the cells but couldn’t accept that Sam truly believed this was the best option. Hate suddenly rose in the Captain’s gullet, hate for whoever had called this kid a monster, for anybody that had ever once believed there was something wrong with him, because those words had engrained themselves into Sam’s soul and that’s why he sat on that gurney thinking it would be a better world if he was gone. But Captain Jack wasn’t about to let that happen. He was going to fight to save Sam, to get rid of the thing inside of him, and to save a bunch of people in the process no matter what it took. Because that’s what he did.

When the doctor had carefully finished his preparations for premeditated murder he lifted a small metal tray with three small syringes and approached Sam. When the needles were waved in his face the hunter involuntary tensed, suddenly jerking at his restraints in a small rush of panic. It meant that some part of him still wanted to live and this set Jack off like a bomb.

The Captain threw himself at the UNIT guards to his right, slamming his shoulder into them and pushing with all his strength to throw them off.  The room was small and the quick burst of action threw one soldier to the floor and the other against a wall, momentarily dazed. Jack turned his back towards the disorientated soldier and tried to grab at a pair of keys from around his belt because having his wrists cuffed like this was a major limitation.

The remaining soldiers rushed him, unwilling to shoot at the Captain in such tight quarters. Jack kicked at the oncoming mob, sending two of them of sprawling into each other. He was about to shove at the last few and make a rush for General Erisa when the soldier behind him finally realized what was happening and grabbed Jack about the neck. Two more UNIT members jumped onto him, ferociously punching Jack in the face and gut until he stopped resisting. When the arm around his throat finally relaxed, Jack fell forward onto his knees.

They dragged him upright again, a blur of navy blue vests, winged pins, and those damn red berets. Out of the fray he only recognized the pale face of the black-haired woman he’d seen jogging on the grounds twenty minutes earlier. She moved behind him, placing her hands on his wrists to keep him in place while the other soldiers fell back into line beside him.

Beaten and bloodied, his hopes starting to fade, Jack searched for Sam on the other end of that glass. The hunter must have heard parts of the quarrel because he was gazing into the room too, but he couldn’t see Jack like the Captain could see him. Sam’s searching glance passed over him like the beacon from the Sandy Hook lighthouse, blindly disappearing back into the dark. Sam turned away after a few moments and settled back into his restraints, that same grim acceptance plastered onto him like a premature death mask.

Jack’s heart sank, his throat knotted, and for a second he acknowledged that he might have to watch his friend die. But then the right cuff about his wrist suddenly loosened and he felt the small fingers of the Sergeant behind him pulling them free. He caught her reflection in the glass as she nodded to him. Jack’s head was spinning, but there wasn’t any time to question why she was doing this, he had one more chance to save Sam and he was going to take it.

General Erisa stepped forward and placed her thumb on the intercom, about to order Sam’s death. Jack developed his strategy.

“Think very carefully about what you do next,” the Captain warned, his hands still resting against the small of his back, his fingers looped through the open cuff, keeping it in place. “This is your last chance to walk away.”

The General paused to consider him, beaten and defenseless, but she didn’t gloat; in fact she appeared to admire him. “A soldier never admits defeat. You’re a good soldier, Captain, one of the best. But this is the only way.”

As she turned from him and pressed her thumb to the intercom, Jack made his move. With his hands free he broke from the pack of UNIT soldiers, striding for the General with deadly intent. One of the uniformed men tried to grab him and hold him back but Jack lashed out with his left fist. The cuff was still locked and the open end arced dangerously, striking at the soldier’s face with a sickening _thwick_. The uniformed glove slipped from the Captain’s shoulder, cupping the soldier’s own face. Jack turned and pushed the soldier back into the others and the first few fell like dominoes.

General Erisa had stepped back from the melee, but she waited for Jack as he approached. Her eyes were wide in alarm but her body was poised, ready for the fight. He swung at her with his fist but she deflected it with ease, countering with her own right hook. Jack caught her wrist and used the momentum to twist the General’s arm behind her back but she turned the move around on him, swinging Jack around instead, and shoving him back into the coagulated mess of UNIT soldiers.

Jack tripped over the prostrate form of a uniformed man and fell to the floor where he briefly caught sight of the Sergeant who had freed him punching another soldier. That man flew into a wall and didn’t get back up. Captain Jack raised his brow in mild surprise. _Damn._

A pair of leather gloves hauled him back up again and Jack struggled with another soldier trying to re-cuff him. Jack grabbed him by the neck, pulled him down and kneed him in the gut. Then he pulled him up and clocked him in the face. The UNIT soldier fell to the side and Jack stepped over him to pull out the 9mm at his waist.

Jack approached General Erisa again, but this time, seeing him armed, she didn’t wait for his first move. They exchanged blows in the confined space, the General acting defensively against the weapon in his hand, and Jack looking for an opening. He finally found it when the General’s back was against the wall and he managed a successful punch to her side. Her head was bent forward in pain and Jack flipped the gun in his hand, grabbing a hold of the barrel and striking the General across the head with the handle. General Erisa unceremoniously collapsed to the floor.

Jack stretched his neck and rotated his shoulder in satisfaction.

He had expected more fighting but the rest of UNIT was already scattered about the room in various stages of unconsciousness. The only people left standing were himself and the Sergeant, the uniformed soldiers lying around her in a circle as if she’d created her own sonic boom. But Jack didn’t have time to wonder over her help, or her superhuman powers. He was still a man on a mission. Rotating the gun in his hand once more Captain Jack Harkness kicked open the door leading to the adjoining room, weapon held out before him.

The man in the white lab coat had hesitated to proceed because of the fray in the other room. Upon seeing Jack now with a gun in his hands and a dangerous spark in his eyes he dropped the metal tray and the syringes, holding his hands up in surrender.

“Don’t shoot!” he pleaded, voice as jittery and metallic as the tray he’d just dropped.

Jack approached the doctor, circling the right side of the gurney Sam was strapped to. The doctor didn’t move, just stood there lamely holding up his hands and staring down the barrel of the gun. When he was close enough Captain Jack lowered his weapon and looked into the doctor’s eyes. “I wasn’t going to.”

Then he repeated his move with the General and knocked the man out with the handle of the pistol. The doctor decorated the floor alongside his needles.

Captain Jack tucked the gun into the waist of his pants and stepped over the fallen doctor to Sam’s side. “You okay?” he asked, gently leaning over and cupping Sam’s cheek with his bruised hands.

Sam smiled up at him sadly; the despair and resignation Jack had noticed earlier tucking itself back into the crevices of Sam’s mind. “I’m getting tired of this,” the hunter admitted wearily.

Jack stood up and began to work on loosening the straps around Sam’s left arm, the cuff around his left wrist clanking noisily against the gurney. “Of bondage?” he teased, a little smirk lilting at the edge of his mouth. “But, Sam, we just started.”

He missed the hunter’s exasperated expression, moving down to free Sam’s waist. When the restraints fell away Sam flexed his arm, stretching over to undo his right side and trying to repress images of the hospital where he’d first met Jack. “I mean needing to be saved.”

Jack spared a dubious glance to his friend while his fingers continued to pry at the belts. “You’re hardly a damsel in distress, Sam.”

With his right arm free as well, the hunter sat upright, massaging his wrists and the scars that were still there. He had no retort for the Captain; in fact he wasn’t paying much attention to Jack at all but to the third figure that stood in the doorway. It was the Sergeant that had helped free Jack.

“Thank god,” she said, heaving a sigh of relief and moving to Sam’s side like an old friend. “For a minute there I thought we were screwed.”

Captain’s Jack ferocity to protect Sam still coursed through his blood. He wrapped his fingers around his borrowed gun and pointed it at the UNIT soldier before she could come any closer.

“I appreciate the help,” Jack said slowly. “But I think we can handle it from here.”

The Sergeant shook her head peevishly, unimpressed with Captain Jack’s mama-bear guardianship. “Oh yeah,” she scowled, “cause you were handling it _real_ well back there. You should consider yourself lucky I came, you two obviously couldn’t save yourselves from a wet paper bag.”

Sam started to chuckle and Jack stared at him incredulously, apparently missing the humor in all of this. “I guess we owe you,” Sam smirked, “Ruby.”

“I told you I wasn’t going to let you go without a fight,” she said, pressing a kiss to his pale forehead.

Jack rolled his eyes, even less thrilled about the stranger than he was seconds before. He silently tucked the gun back into his belt and finished freeing Sam’s left leg. When Ruby saw what he was doing she helped as well.

“And before you rag on me about the meatsuit,” the demon began, “I didn’t have enough time to dress up Jane Doe and fake my way in like you did. Hitching a ride was the best I could do on short notice.”

“How’d you even get in?” Jack pressed. “All UNIT soldiers are checked for possession.”

“They are,” Ruby confirmed. “But Sam here failed his physical so fantastically that I managed to slip inside without it.”

Sam scoffed. “Yeah well, punching me in the face didn’t exactly help.”

“I couldn’t help you if these creeps knew what we both were.” Ruby undid the final belt and Sam swung his legs over the side. “But honestly Sam, I never knew you were going to get this sick.”

“I didn’t even think I’d see you again,” Sam conceded. “When I found out I was infected, I assumed you were a goner too.”

Ruby folded her arms across her chest and stared at the gurney reflectively. “That’s kind of the weird thing. I made it as far as Utah before coma girl started blowing chunks. I was starting to kiss my demon ass goodbye and then all the symptoms just started getting better. I tracked you down and hopped the first girl in uniform I could find.”

Jack swept past them suddenly, rummaging in a small black storage closet in the back of the med bay. “It’s already starting to reverse,” he said, removing two rolls of duct tape and tossing one to the demon. “Ruby, wasn’t it? Help me restrain these soldiers. We bought ourselves a short window of opportunity and I don’t want anyone sounding the alarm.”

Ruby caught the tape but glared at Jack indignantly. “I came here to help _Sam._ I am through taking orders from a bunch of pinheaded little soldiers.”

Jack was in her face before she even finished the insult. “Then if you don’t want him to die, do as I say… Oh and,” Jack raised his wrist, the handcuffs still dangling from him. “Do you mind?”

Ruby hesitated for all of half a second before she sighed in disgust, fished the keys from her soldier gal’s belt and unlocked the remaining cuff. Jack twined his fingers around the restraints and moved wordlessly into the next room. With Ruby’s help they taped the soldiers' and doctor’s hands and feet together, a piece of tape over each mouth ensuring their silence. With General Erisa, however, he chose only to cuff her hands behind her back, dragging the woman to her feet as she slowly started to regain consciousness.

Sam watched them position each soldier on the floor and remove their weapons, storing them in the adjoining room. He leaned heavily against the wall, trying to hide the fact that he could barely stand. After Jack had secured the General, Ruby slipped her arm under Sam to support him and Jack looked her over skeptically.

“Are you even sure we can trust her?” Jack challenged. “After all she’s at least _partly_ responsible for this.”

“I’m _what_?”

“With that little _stunt_ of yours,” Jack said pointedly. “Taking me for a midnight demon-ride. Remember? Cause I don’t.”

“Do you think I would infect him on _purpose_?” she growled. “You don’t know _anything_ , okay? Just because you drop from the sky and run around with a hunter for a month doesn’t mean you get it. This whole UNIT thing is just a freak show off to the side. The _real_ scary shit gets _much_ bigger.”

The Captain didn’t have time to tell her off. He didn’t have time to tell her how the ‘real scary shit’ spanned farther and deeper across the universe than her beady little possessed brain could imagine, that the real scary shit was in the form of genocidal pepper shakers, of angel statuary, of Time Lords gone mad; and if even if he did, a little part of him would know that she was still right about one thing. There _was_ something there between Sam and that demon, something he wasn’t privy to, and though it smelled a little of sex and desperation it mostly stank like a rotten secret.  But Jack didn’t have time to ask.

 “Fine,” he grunted. “But there’s one thing _you_ should know.”

Still dragging the semi-conscious General with him, Jack unceremoniously draped his free hand around the back of Sam’s neck and pulled him into a kiss. Ruby was forced to support Sam’s weight as Sam suddenly and willingly reciprocated. The demon made an ugly face at Jack’s egoism and then saw the General, who had just started to register what was happening, make an ugly face as well. They looked at each other, back to the two boys kissing, and then made even uglier faces.

When Jack was done with his public display he pulled back, panting slightly from exertion and grinning from ear to ear. “ _That’s_ what it feels like when I mean it,” he declared proudly.  And then, as if sex and violence were obvious synonyms, he drew the gun from about his waist again and held it at his side. “Now let’s stop this thing.”

Shoving the door open with his shoulder Jack disappeared into the hall with the captive General to seek out UNIT’s main lab. Ruby shook her head when the Captain was out of sight.

“What a _freak_ ,” she muttered and Sam just smiled.

~~~

Jack burst into UNIT’s main lab with General Erisa held at gunpoint, barking orders for the soldiers and lab techs to stand down like a badass protagonist from every action movie ever made. But they weren’t fighting Nazis, or Russians, or some vague threat from the Middle East. Jack was fighting the people who were _supposed_ to be on his side. It was a morally ambiguous scenario that didn’t leave him quite sanctimonious enough to shout _yippee ki yay motherfuckers_.

But UNIT didn’t seem to recognize his badassery; they had their guns trained on the Captain and didn’t budge.

“They don’t believe that you’ll shoot me,” the General explained. “They don’t believe you’re that kind of man.”

Jack held the General tighter, flexing his grip on the gun. “My back’s against the wall here, General,” he whispered in reply. “I don’t think you want to _find out_ what kind of man that makes me.”

General Erisa regarded her troops, sheltered behind desks and computers with their guns aimed at the immortal man’s head, running through every chaotic scenario they had ever trained for. She had known that recruiting Jack would mean trouble from the get-go. There was nothing on the Captain except his reputation which was akin to playing telephone for over 100 years: what had once been fact was now greatly distorted. Whereas the Doctor had pages and pages of files: different faces, aliases, who he had helped, when, and where-there was nothing on Jack. He was the nothing man, someone who had always been there like a trinket passed down from generation to generation until no one could remember exactly where it came from or who had it first. His past was a purposefully created black void, and General Erisa stared into that void and found, as she had personally discovered, it defied prediction.

“Stand down,” she ordered.

Ruby and Sam entered the lab behind him and the Captain had Ruby do a repeat performance of their stunt earlier: disarm, restrain, repeat. Then Jack shoved the General into a computer chair and wheeled her over to where Sam sat, on the floor, near the entrance and looking the worse for wear every passing second.

“Is that it?” Sam asked, looking past Jack to the tank in the center of the room that bathed everything in a neon-green light. “It’s kind of…beautiful,” he wondered. “In an evil-alien sort of way.”

“It’s supposed to share emotions,” Jack explained, staring at the General accusingly. “But something happened to it, something horrible.”

The General, who couldn’t possibly look more irritated, looked more irritated. “I’ve already informed you of the state we found it in. It was located offsite, in a private unit of storage containers where personal effects were detained. Hardly the proper management for a creature of national interest,” she huffed

“They _did_ store it with Charles,” Jack confirmed wistfully. “I’d forgotten that.”

“Charles,” Sam repeated. “The green-eyed demon?” He stared at the tank again, mesmerized by its phosphorescent glow and the small creature floating inside. “Do you think it had anything to do with what he turned into?”

The Captain shook his head. “I can’t say for sure it was Charles. The Sententia had such a powerful connection it’s possible that when it was severed it created a sort of _mimicry_ of the man, purely from its own memory. I don’t imagine it would be very stable. Maybe it needed a human form to complete the illusion?”

“But that’s just one man,” Sam said. “That can’t be _every_ demon.”

Jack thought about this long and hard and then delivered his expert opinion. “I don’t know.”

Sam had never really thought about the origins of demons, or he had but he had accepted what lore he read, or what anecdotes Ruby told. Jack’s sci-fi approach had opened the hunter’s eyes to a whole new realm of explanation. The funny thing was it didn’t really have that much more to offer. At the end of the day, they were still running too fast to look behind them.

“So…Charles died,” Sam began again. “Was this thing okay until then?”

Jack ran a hand through his hair and sighed, thinking back a few centuries. “I wasn’t around when it happened, but yeah as far as I’m aware it was stable, otherwise they would reported some kind of change.”

“Then it’s pretty obvious what happened isn’t it?” Sam laid his head against the wall. “It’s grieving.” Jack cocked his head curiously and Sam continued. “It shares emotions, it speaks through emotions, and then suddenly the only thing it’s ever had any connection to, galaxies away from home, dies. It’s grieving,” he concluded. “It doesn’t know who did this, there’s no way anybody can tell it, so I bet it sat in that storage unit for years plotting revenge against anybody, anything it could find. After all,” Sam added quietly. “Isn’t that what happens when you let grief consume you? It becomes a poison, so it literally became a poison.”

His conclusion was punctuated with a sputtering cough at the end of which he found the Captain staring at him like he’d never seen Sam before. Sam smiled tightly. "Call it personal experience.”

Jack’s expression flickered warily. He turned away from Sam, choosing to face the Sententia instead. “Nobody knows who killed Charles,” he said. “But there might be a way to talk to the Sententia, calm it somehow.”

“And tell it what?” Ruby challenged, finished restraining the guards. “That the Nazis did it? How is that going to convince it not to kill humans again?”

“It’s _impossible_ to talk to it,” the General interrupted. “Cognitively it doesn’t function the same way as we do. It doesn’t _have_ a language; you can’t _explain_ anything to it. Even our very best psychics have failed to establish any kind of meaningful dialogue. They only report that they hear it screaming.”

Jack shut his eyes, remembering his own similar experience.

“The only thing it does now is kill what it’s prompted to kill,” the General concluded.

“Then why can’t we just kill it back?” Ruby growled.

Jack rolled his eyes, begging some nonexistent deity for more patience than he had. “Because that won’t save Sam,” he snapped. The Captain stepped up to the Sententia’s tank and traced the contours of the computers recording infinite amounts of data, touched the cold, wet perspiration from the alien’s tank, and followed the wires from it to the database everything was stored in.

“We can give it a language it understands,” he concluded. “You see when we’re asleep our mind switches from processing sight and sound to developing emotional memories, turning what we’ve experienced into long term memory. Since the Sententia is totally dependent on outside sources for sights and sounds, my guess is its main function is developing those emotional memories. So being conscious and trying to talk to it is like sign language for the blind.” Captain Jack leaned over a computer and pulled out a long cord. He took a knife from a soldier and started stripping back the wire. “There was an experiment in Brazil recently where two rats had their brains connected over the internet. It’s a primitive version of neural relay but for our purposes I think I can wire together something basic.”

Ruby shook her head. “You really like hearing yourself talk don’t you?”

“So the person wired up is going be asleep _and_ talking to the Sententia?” Sam asked.

Jack ignored the demon, looking up from what he was trying to fashion to answer Sam. “I imagine it’ll feel like dreaming.”

Sam sat up slightly, draping his arms over his knees. “But who’s going to do it?”

Ruby glanced furtively at Sam but Jack didn’t hesitate. “I am,” he declared, setting aside the cord and removing his coat. “I have a history with this thing. It should be my job.”

“But you’re the only one who has any idea what the hell you’re talking about,” Ruby protested. “Are we just supposed to wait here while you take a nap and hope things turn out alright?”

“If I slip into a coma you can shoot me. Happy?”

Sam shook his head. “She has a point, Jack. You said yourself this is experimental, if something goes wrong whose going to know how to fix it? Plus we don’t really have time for a second chance at this do we?”

Captain Jack looked from Ruby to Sam and scoffed. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’ll do it,” Sam offered. “You can put _me_ under.”

Jack stared at the hunter, slack-jawed. “No,” he said, stubbornly returning to stripping wires. “ _Absolutely not_.”

“But why not,” Sam pressed. “I’m sitting here waiting to die Jack, but I didn’t come all this way to stand by the sidelines. We’re partners…remember? Nothing’s changed.”

Jack stared resolutely at the floor. “I know. But the truth is Sam, there’s no way to tell exactly what’s going to happen with this. I’m just not willing to let you go. I almost lost you before.”

Sam stared at him incredulously. “You think this is about you, or how _guilty_ you feel?

Jack’s face hardened. “You’re not in a _condition_ to do anything, Sam.”

“I can help with that.” Ruby uncrossed her arms and knelt next to the hunter, brushing some hair out of his face.

Sam studied her curiously. “Do you think it will help? Even like this?”

The demon rolled up her sleeve and removed a small knife from soldier gal’s belt. “That thing inside of you is trying to kill a human right? Then this’ll confuse it, probably buy us some time. Plus I bet it’ll make you feel a whole lot better.” She pressed the blade of the knife into her skin and Jack shot to his feet.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping,” Ruby grunted, slicing into her own flesh. Warm, red blood coagulated under the blade and slowly dripped from the wound.

Sam stared at the blood, surprised by his own longing. He wrapped his hand about the demon’s wrist and drew the wound closer to himself without any furthering prompting. “It’s okay Jack, I’ve done this before.”

“Done what?” the Captain asked with increasing alarm.

“Go on,” Ruby coaxed, holding her arm out to the hunter.

“Drank demon blood,” Sam all but whispered, mesmerized by lines of red sliding down Ruby's pale skin.

“Boy,” the General suddenly hissed from the corner she had been tied in and forgotten. “What sort of _abomination_ are you?”

Sam visibly winced and Jack turned his frustration on her, grabbing the General by the lapels of her uniform and hauling her to her feet. “Nobody asked you,” he barked. Shoving her back down again the General collapsed into the chair, clumsily rolling away from them with an obnoxious _squeaksqueaksqueak_.

Jack turned his uneasy attention back to the hunter who was purposefully looking at anything but him. “Is this what you want Sam?”

“I’m not weak,” Sam asserted shakily and then, like reciting a mantra. “I can stop this thing.”

Captain Jack looked at the options before him and knew they were all the wrong ones. He had voluntereed because it was his duty to do so. He was supposed to kick ass and come out on top right? But Jack knew all too well that heroes failed, that people died pointlessly, and something always had to be sacrificed for the greater good. The Captain's facade of control was crumbling, his bluff had been called. Twenty minutes ago he thought Sam was going to die, that UNIT was going to win and now that they had crawled an inch forward, he thought the same thing again.

He didn't want to put Sam through this because he thought the kid had been through enough. The Captain remembered watching Sam stare at the stars as if he was waiting for something, someone, to come down and save him. Selfishly, Jack wanted that to be him but now he understood Sam's self-deprecation. Sam wanted to be saved from what he was, but at the same time he had done this to himself, and maybe that was enough to erase Jack's guilt for what he was about to say.

The Captain's nod was imperceptible and final. It felt like putting Stephen up on that pedastal all over again. “Do it.”

As if the Captain’s support absolved him of all guilt, Sam pressed his lips to Ruby’s wound and drank greedily. Jack only watched for a moment before turning his back and walking away. He picked up his cord and his knife and continued to fashion small electrodes to connect Sam to the Sententia.

General Erisa’s chair had rolled her next to the Captain, and she sat with her hands cuffed, unable to turn away from the grisly sight except to glance at the Captain briefly. “You were right, Jack,” she said quietly. “I _didn’t_ want to find out what kind of man you were.”

Captain Jack turned to her, eyes blazing, a knife gripped tightly in his hand. He took one step forward, placed a foot on her chair and pushed it farther away from him.

He finished stripping wires and assembling electrodes. Sam sat in a chair without anybody’s help. Jack placed the electrodes at even lengths across Sam’s scalp. Then he drew a syringe of anesthetic and injected it gently into the hunter’s arm.

Sam grimaced as the syringe was pulled from his skin. “I’ve had enough of needles for one lifetime I think.”

Captain Jack disposed of the needle and stood by waiting for the drug’s effects to begin, carefully monitoring Sam’s read outs. “Remember Sam, It’s _your_ memories, it’s your head. Wherever you find yourself don’t forget that.”

Sam nodded slowly, sleep starting to numbly creep over him.

“And if things go wrong,” Jack added. “If you can’t stop it, send it into neural shock. It’s fragile; you can overwhelm it if you try. It’s not like killing it, more like pressing a permanent pause button okay?”

But Jack sounded like he was talking to him from the end of a long tunnel. Sam’s vision started to blur and then everything faded to black.


	16. Head Games

It was late by the time Dean dropped him off back in front of the little home he and Jessica shared in Stanford. Sam dumped his duffle bag on the floor and slid his keys into his pocket, searching the dark house for the only person he wanted to see right now.

“Jess?” He called out. He moved from the foyer into the bedroom but she wasn’t asleep, and the light in the kitchen was off too. Sam guessed she must have spent the night out somewhere, so he collapsed onto their bed with a heavy sigh. _I hope she’s having more fun than I am_ , he thought, closing his eyes and replaying the ghost he and his brother had just hunted in Jericho.

It had been years since Sam had been a part of “the family business” but he wasn’t surprised how quickly his instincts had kicked in. Sam had meant what he said to Dean, they were trained as warriors, and the younger Winchester knew he’d never be able to hide that part of himself. It was lonely, having to lie to Jessica about ghosts and demons and the things his family did. At times, though, Sam felt just as lonely alongside Dean. Dean got a kick out of hunting that Sam could never understand so he’d accepted from an early age that he would never fit in, no matter where he went.

Sam missed his brother, but he didn’t miss the baggage that came along with his family: the killing, the unquestionable orders, the existential need to save the world one ‘dead sonofabitch’ at a time. He’d left it all for a reason.

What he _really_ wanted was to have the same kind of luxury that everyone else was afforded: normalcy. Someday in the future he wanted to worry about a mortgage, or about getting a raise. He wanted Jess to be pregnant, and he wanted to raise a kid in a world where he didn’t have to worry about what lurked in the shadows. Everyone else had these things, why couldn’t he?

A drop of water interrupted Sam’s thoughts, maybe from a leaking pipe or some shoddy ceiling work; this house wasn’t entirely up to code, but it was the best he and Jess could afford for the time being. He wrinkled his nose, determined to ignore it and fall asleep until Jess came to wake him up and playfully berate him for passing out in his day clothes. A few persistent, annoying drips later and Sam opened his eyes to glare at the problem.

That’s when he saw Jess in a white night slip pinned to the ceiling with a red gash across her stomach that had bled out and stained her negligee. It was _her_ blood that had fallen from the ceiling and splattered across his skin.

Sam gasped, life sucked out of him. At first he thought it was a dream; he had nightmares of this exact scenario several times. Back then, Sam shook it off and tried to forget. He slowly understood that this time it was _real_ and it paralyzed Sam with terror. The same dark magic that had ripped open the love of his life and glued her to the ceiling now pinned him to his bed. It wanted him to see this.

“No,” Sam objected. His protest was meek from disbelief but it quickly escalated to horror. “No! Jess!”

A sudden wall of fire spread out of Jessica like a pair of wings. It engulfed her entire body and licked along the ceiling at her sides. And Sam watched it all. He watched her beautiful face char and crackle, her lips swelter, and her eyelids turn to kindling. He would have watched as his own life went up in flames if his brother hadn’t kicked down the door and pulled him from the room. Sometimes Sam still woke up with her name on his lips and the taste of sulfur on his tongue.

~~

Sam jerked backed to consciousness inside UNIT’s lab with a violent gasp, dropped his head between his knees and peeled the electrodes from his scalp in one savage yank. He was completely numb for several agonizing moments except for a dull, persistent ache behind his eyes and the strange taste of sulfur in his mouth. When he regained feeling, his nerves started to tingle from the base of his brain to the bottom of his feet. The sensation grew, until every part of him was responsive but on fire like a limb that’s fallen asleep.

It was a disorientating experience and Sam kept his head planted firmly between his knees until he could breathe easier. He vaguely expected a firm pair of hands to clutch at him and ask if he was alright, a worried, ragged edge to some disembodied voice calling his name. But there was nothing, and the hunter was too in shock to spare it much thought.

When he regained control over the tips of his fingers and the soles his feet, Sam determined that he was alright. In fact he felt great. Whatever confusion he had just experienced was a side-effect of his confrontation with the Sententia, and when it had passed he felt normal again; better than normal. The nausea that had plagued him for the past week dissipated and left a renewed feeling of strength in its place. By now, Sam knew this feeling well: it was his body’s response to Ruby’s blood, as if every artery, every vein, and every capillary had thanked him for his choice.

Victory bells resonated in Sam’s skull: he'd completed his mission! He couldn’t recall any details of what had happened since Captain Jack put him under. He couldn't feel the effects of the virus, though, which spoke for itself. When Sam sat up with a jubilant grin to announce his achievement his joy quickly deflated. The lab was empty.

There were signs of a skirmish throughout the room. The Sententia’s tank had been smashed, flooding the room with broken glass and the unknown cocktail of chemicals it held. The UNIT soldiers that had been bound and disarmed were all face-down on the floor, pools of blood spilling from their mouths. Sam checked them for vital signs: they were dead but intact, no bullet wounds, no stab wounds, just blood staining their teeth.

There was a sinking feeling in the pit of the hunter’s stomach but it wasn’t the return of any nausea. Something big had happened while he was out, something awful.

Sam frisked the body near the lab door, confiscated the first decent weapon, checked the clip for ammo and holstered it in the waistband of his own uniform. He knew he had to find Jack and Ruby. It was a goal that flashed like a light in the fog of his confusion. There were too many questions, what ifs, and what the hells to sort through right now.

With his determination set, Sam pushed the lab door open to begin his quest, only to find it stuck. It opened an inch and then refused to budge, as if something heavy were pushing on it from the other side. Sam leaned his shoulder into the steel and grunted with exertion until the door finally gave way. He stumbled into the hall and gaped at a scene straight from his own nightmares.

A stack of bodies had been blocking the door. The entire length of the hall was littered with UNIT soldiers. Sam stepped out of the lab and the Sententia’s chemicals seeped out behind him, mixing with the red of the soldiers’ blood beneath his feet. His shoes made a sickening noise as they sloshed through the carnage.

The hunter’s heart throbbed furiously in his chest and his pulse beat like a drum against his skull. No longer bells of victory, the sound in his head was verging closer to panic. This wasn’t the standoff with UNIT that he and Ruby had feared, this was a massacre!

Sam reached for the gun holstered about his waist, with thoughts of Lilith running through his head. It was entirely possible that some demon, somewhere, had found out about UNIT’s project and attempted to shut it down. Sam’s palms started to sweat on his useless gun. He imagined what kind of tortures a horde of demons could put an immortal man through, and his pace quickened.

Sam rounded a corner and thankfully discovered Jack. His limp figure was draped over another pair of still bodies, his gray war coat splayed around him.

“Jack!” Sam shouted, rushing to the Captain’s side. He dropped to his knees and peeled his friend off the mound of stiff corpses, noting the blood that stained the front of his shirt. If there had been a wound there it had already healed and Jack awoke seconds later in Sam’s arms.

“It’s okay,” Sam muttered as Jack reached out for anything and anyone to ground himself but only found Sam. When Jack locked eyes with him, the Captain’s look of disgust was like a knife in his side.

“You’re awake?” Jack asked dubiously.

Sam nodded mutely as the Captain pulled away. “What happened?”

“I died, Sam. _They_ died because of the virus,” Jack explained tersely, motioning to the corpses around him. “It didn’t work. You didn’t do what you were supposed to and now it’s going to spread.”

“How is that possible? I was supposed to be the catalyst but the virus in _me_ is gone!” Sam challenged.

“Because you’re pumped full of _demon blood_ ,” the Captain spat. “And the virus only works on humans now, so I guess that means you’re exempt.”

The world stopped for a moment and Sam became suddenly aware of himself, of the still-warm blood staining his uniform as he knelt, of the twitching ache in his veins from his own mixed blood. Ruby had given him untold physical strength but it was a different kind of strength he needed to survive _this_ sort of attack, and Sam found himself lacking. He was overcome with shame, his own special brand that he tried to keep hidden away, tucked neatly into some corner of his subconscious where it could quietly eat through him like acid. “What are you saying?” he asked quietly, trying to swallow with a dry throat.

Captain Jack’s fierce blue eyes glinted like steel. “That I was wrong. About you.”

Sam nodded slowly, he knew what was coming. “So this is all my fault?”

“You’ve known that for a while,” Jack concluded. He stood and looked down the bloody hallway, clotted with carnage. “That’s why I finally let you go.”

Sam blinked feverishly, his breath catching on some painful emotion lodged in his throat. “What do you mean you let me go? You mean letting me meet the Sententia?” He tilted his head as a troubling thought surfaced. “Unless by meeting the Sententia you thought…that I’d die.”

“You tried to hide yourself from me but I finally saw what you are Sam, you’re a self-created monster. You hate what you are but then you feed yourself poison to make it worse. You _were_ remorseful for causing this, even if a little hypocritical, so I gave you the chance to make it right.”

“By dying?!”

“By sacrificing yourself.” Captain Jack stepped forward and grabbed his shoulder but his fingers felt like talons. “I’ve been around a long time, Sam. And you’re not the first person I’ve thrown into the fire, just one of the few who’s consented to it.”

Sam’s eyes widened as he stared into the face of a man who’s lived too long, seen too much, whose recklessness had slowly turned to carelessness, whose immortality had numbed him to everything that once made him human.

“Oh my god,” Sam hissed, ripping himself from the Captain’s grip. “ _You’re_ a monster.”

~~

“Hellhound,” Dean whispered loudly, staring despondently at a giant hound that stood waiting to devour him.

Sam stared blankly in the direction of the growling, trying to piece together how he had gone from a dream to UNIT, and Jack, and now this. “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded gruffly, glancing around the living room of the upper class suburban home they’d invaded in order to kill Lilith. But neither Dean to his left, nor Ruby to his right responded; they were too preoccupied with the invisible behemoth just a few feet in front of them.

Sam was about to continue his protest when a terrifying bark sent a chill up all of their spines and jerked them into action. Dean and Ruby dashed from the living area, down a hall, and into another room but Sam hesitated for just a moment before following their example. They barricaded themselves behind a pair of double doors, Sam and Ruby trying to hold the beast at bay as Dean spread a bag of black Goofer dust at their feet. The Goofer dust acted like salt against ghosts. It wouldn’t hold the Hellhound off forever, but it might buy them some time.

Sam gritted his teeth and shoved his weight against the door. It rattled and shook from the hound’s attack. “Something’s fucking with me,” he growled, his eyes darting to every corner of the room, searching for the source of said fuckery, “this isn’t real.”

“Oh it’s real alright!” his brother huffed, moving to the window after he’d laid down a thick black line of dust under the door. It stopped trembling and Sam relaxed; Ruby stared at him like he had two heads.

“No. It’s not,” Sam insisted, “you’re already dead.”

Dean turned to face his brother, ominously tying the small pouch back up after he’d made the window safe. “Yeah. I get that, Sam.”

The younger Winchester shook his head, dismissing a sudden jab of guilt. “That’s not what I meant. Dean there’s an alien in my head and it’s messing with my thoughts. This is just…a nightmare. One more bad dream in a string of them.”

Dean stared at him like he’d caught his little brother in a big fib, as if Sam was just inventing this to be a little shit. “Dude,” his brother started to lecture, “I am about to be torn apart by some overgrown pet, we’re surrounded by demons, and hell’s biggest bitch just pulled a Houdini. So if you could tone down the crazy just a _smidge_ , I’d really friggin’ appreciate it!”

“Maybe you should give me the knife,” Ruby suggested warily, extending her open palm to Sam. “You don’t really seem up to this right now.”

Sam scoffed and shook his head. Even in his _dreams_ his brother didn’t give him any respect. “You don’t get it do you? I know how this plays out! This is Lilith right here!” Sam motioned to Ruby, the demon-killing blade in his right hand. “And this doesn’t kill her,” he concluded, tossing the blade aside with a laugh. “She takes us by surprise, she lets the Hellhound in, and I have to watch you die!”

His older brother shot a predatory glare at Lilith-in-disguise and then turned the same distrust towards him. Sam paid his figment-brother no attention.

“So we can skip it?” Sam announced. He tilted his head back, scanning the ceiling, his arms open wide, inviting whatever second party was here to show themselves. “Cause I’m done with the games, or whatever this is supposed to be. You’ve had your fun so now let’s--” Suddenly the room Sam was standing in was empty. Dean and Lilith had disappeared, and the Hellhound had been muted.  Sam lowered his arms and looked around warily. “—talk.”

“I was young when I was taken from my home.”

Lilith was sitting on a table in front of him, or at least the figure of the young girl she had possessed while he and Dean went hunting for her. She sat passively with her legs crossed, daintily clutching a small teddy bear around its neck. She smiled at him wistfully but her eyes weren’t white, they were green and he knew that it was the Sententia speaking through some familiar form of his own imagining ‘finding a language’ as Jack had put it.

“Relatively speaking,” she continued. “Humans have such short, broken lives. I never had a chance to be a part of ‘The Ritual’ as my people called it; a joining of two minds into one fluid state of being. That’s how my kind survives, you know, by exchanging that kind of energy.”

Sam tried to relax. He had gotten what he asked for: the Sententia was here in front of him, or inside his head, or whatever. He had to remember that scene with Jack wasn’t real, he hadn’t failed, the Captain didn’t expect him to die, he could still accomplish what he came here to do.

“You said you were taken?” Sam puzzled. “By who?”

“By what,” it corrected. “I was taken by the Void, ripped through space and time, pulled into the dark until it brought me here, dropped me onto this cold little rock. The creatures here are so…insulated inside their bodies, their minds. It’s terribly lonely, to be so different.”

Sam lowered his eyes, studying the curious details of the little girl’s well-polished Mary Jane’s, even though none of this was real. “I can imagine. Then again you’re right here, so maybe I don’t.”

“You have many questions,” the young girl smiled, as if she were digging around Sam’s mind even then. “I can feel them.”

He inhaled deeply, recalling everything Jack had told him about this species, everything he had told him about space. Sam had no idea what ‘the Void’ was, though the Sententia had spoken of it like any species with its head out of its ass should know. Sam wondered if maybe he wasn’t the right person for the job after all. “This _Ritual_ of yours, is that what you did with Charles?”

“He was the first mind I clung to,” the little girl confirmed, hugging her teddy bear as an example. “But it was a tepid connection. One-way, you would describe it. I saw and felt and understood everything from his side but he…would only feel _part_ of me.

“That’s how it is with humans in my world. They seek us out because it is believed to be a thrill. We are happy in our natural environment so they experience happiness. It is a different case, however, when one is torn from their home. Still, Charles made a place for me, he was very kind and I was content.”

“Until he died?”

“He fell.” The little girl emptily stared off into the space over Sam’s right shoulder. “And I fell with him.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. “Fell?”

“Back into the dark!” she cried shrilly. Now she clutched at her teddy bear for comfort, squeezing so tightly Sam thought the bear’s head might pop clean off. “Into the heat that burned cold. It tore at him, his flesh, his meat, his mind and I could feel it all. For what felt like _thousands_ of years I suffered beside him and I think he knew I was there, but I was no comfort. He blamed his torture on me!”

“What tore at you?” Sam asked carefully. “The Void?”

“ _The figures in the dark_ with evil, smiling, grinning faces.”

Sam’s pupils dilated with recognition. “Demons. _You_ were tortured in hell, right alongside Charles?” Sam passed a hand across his face. “Which means Jack was wrong. _You_ didn’t create Charles, your connection with Charles dragged you down into hell _with_ him.”

“We came back changed.”

“Yeah. He came back a demon.” Sam paused, eyeing the girl sitting before him with renewed suspicion. “What did _you_ come back as?”

“Vengeance,” she said cruelly, her green eyes radiating in front of him like cursed jewels. “For being pulled from my home, for being tortured, for being alone. For everything.”

Sam tensed, staring at this bizarre alien incredulously. “You’re not grieving at all are you? You know exactly what you’re doing. You’ve known all along.”

“I just want the pain to stop,” it explained. “I wanted everything to stop…because I was lonely.”

“That’s… a really shitty reason to start killing people,” the hunter grimaced.

The little girl smiled knowingly. “You want me to stop. That’s why you’re here isn’t it Sam?”

Sam laughed. “I’m starting to get the feeling this was a pointless trip.”

“Not at all,” she assured. “Because we can do _The Ritual_ now.”

Sam opened his mouth to ask what she meant but then he remembered her definition: “The joining of two minds?” He looked about him nervously as if he expected the walls of some giant trap to suddenly ensnare him. “No…that’s, that’s not why I came.”

“You will do The Ritual, and I will stop.”

“The virus?” Sam confirmed. “You’ll stop it?”

“Just as you please.”

He thought about it for a moment. “What happens in this Ritual of yours?”

“It’s little different from what you’re experiencing now,” she explained. “We can create places that don’t exist, or replay old memories. For now it has only been one-sided, but with this little trick of yours you have come to me so completely that I can finish the circuit. I can show you memories of my world. You will know me better.”

“What’s there to know?” Sam growled. “That you’re so psychotic?”

“Temper. Temper.”

“You’re asking me to stay here and keep dreaming," Sam said. "But what’s the point? Everything you’ve shown me so far has been…horrible.”

“Then we can create something more pleasant,” she cooed. “If that’s what you wish.”

“But it wouldn’t be real!” Sam dissented, despair creeping into his voice. “I know my life isn’t that great, but if I _have_ to live it, I want it to matter. Making a difference is the only thing I have. _I’m not going to give up now_.”

“Then your nightmare will come true,” the Sententia warned. “And those people will all die.”

Sam ground his teeth in frustration, crushed between a rock and a hard place. He reviewed his earlier nightmare and what Jack had said. “So that’s it then. You want me to sacrifice myself?”

“You wanted to, before.”

Sam hung his head. “Maybe I changed my mind,” he said quietly. “Maybe I want to live.”

“You should have thought about that,” she chuckled, “ _before_ you volunteered. Now which memory would you like to revisit next? A happy one, perhaps, to ease the pain? Or maybe one with Ruby and her blood? Then you might remember why it would be _better_ for you to stay out of your world.”

Sam’s nostrils flared at the mention of blood. Even though he was asleep he could still feel it flowing through him, feel the strength it gave him, waiting to be used. He had been trying to run from this power of his because he was afraid of what it would turn him into but if it was his choice between a comatose potato or a supernatural freak, Sam would rather be the freak. It wasn’t in his nature to sit back and play nice. Before Dean had gotten ripped apart by the Hellhound he had made Sam promise that he would fight, and that’s exactly what he was going to do, even if Dean couldn’t understand the weapons he chose to use.

“Charles came back as a demon,” Sam began thoughtfully, clenching and unclenching his fists. “So maybe when you came back, you were part demon too. And if you’re part demon then…maybe you can be exorcised like one.”

Sam extended his arm and closed his eyes, concentrating until he heard the Sententia start to choke.

~~

Ruby passed a damp cloth over Sam’s fevered brow. Captain Jack was standing beside the computers monitoring the signals from this messed up brain-exchange, or whatever the hell was happening. She glared daggers at the Captain’s backside, imagining what his innards would look like draped over his neck like jewelry. “You realize if anything happens to Sam,” Ruby began.

“You’ll have my guts for garters,” Jack finished peevishly. “Yeah. I get it.” He went back to observing the readouts with a disappointed shake of his head. “You know for once I wish someone was more _creative_ with their threats.”

Ruby quirked her brow curiously. “I don’t need to be creative; I’m a demon, remember? I’ve already been to hell.”

“You’re _not_ a demon,” Jack scowled, still tensely watching his computer screen.

Ruby discerned the angry edge to his rebuttal and she leaned back onto her heels with a smirk. “Is this the part where you accuse me of being an alien?”

“Maybe you’re not alien, maybe you’re just old.” Jack thrummed his fingers against the desk and finally turned his back to the computers, fixing her with a stony stare. “You respond to ancient symbols and some people call that magic but these kids in the 21st century just aren’t old enough to realize that’s still a kind of science. You get power by performing cheap tricks and convincing them you’re these figures in their religion. That way you get followers, worshippers on _both_ sides and that gives you more power.” Jack narrowed his eyes, “Is that what Sam is for you? More power?”

Ruby nonchalantly brushed Jack’s allegations aside like she brushed back her hair. “I just think he’s the guy that’s gonna save the world. I guess that makes me a sucker for the hero-type.”

Jack folded his arms across his chest and shook his head at Ruby’s sarcastic dismissal. He pivoted back to the computer screens in time to see the readouts fluctuating wildly. His eyes bulged in alarm and at the same time he heard Ruby shout Sam’s name. Jack turned to find Sam’s eyes and mouth stretched wide, his eyes rolled back in head.  Sam fell forward, off the chair, and the electrodes ripped from his skin on the way down.

Ruby was the first to kneel beside him, cradling Sam’s head in her lap as the hunter’s breathing slowly regulated. “Sam?” she said. “Sam are you okay?” The surviving Winchester was limp, barely conscious.

“Are you with us, Sam?” Jack called out a little louder, firmer.

Sam’s eyelids fluttered open and his gaze met the Captain’s. “Is this real?” he whispered.

Jack laughed a little in relief. “Yes,” he confirmed. “You’re awake now.”

Sam smiled, nodded, and then closed his eyes again. Ruby shook him but he had passed out. “What the hell happened?!” she glowered.

Captain Jack studied the readouts on UNIT’s computers once again. Sam appeared as a flatline because he had been disconnected. The Sententia’s readouts were another story. The thin jagged lines read like a mind in a deep coma. Jack grinned. “He did it,” he whispered, turning to look down at the weary hunter in Ruby’s lap. “He did it.”


	17. Further on (Up the Road)

Sam woke with Ruby beside him in another cheap, anonymous motel room. He vaguely recalled bursting out of his horrid dream sequence back in UNIT’s lab, Ruby cradling his head in her lap and Jack’s voice reaching out to him like a distant but firm anchor, but everything after that was a bit hazy.  Sam watched Ruby as she slept, her midnight hair draped across her host like a blanket. There was wood paneling on the wall across from him and paisley pink flowers plastered everywhere else. He could smell that the place had recently been Febreezed in a poor attempt to cover up the underlying mold, and it made him smile. The last few days had been such a frenetic whirlwind of nearly cataclysmic disasters that these simple, mundane surroundings felt surreal.

Sam sat up on the bed with a grunt to take inventory of every limb and muscle, checking them for any lingering sign of the Sententia’s contamination. As he did Ruby’s eyes snapped open and when she saw that he was awake she was relieved.

“I guess Sleeping Beauty finally decided to join us,” she teased, propping herself up on a pillow. “That head shit must have really got to you. You’ve been out for almost 48 hours.”

Sam gawked at Ruby skeptically. “What?”

How was it possible that he had slept for nearly two days? Was Ruby here that whole time, watching over him while Jack…wait, where was Jack? Sam peered over the demon’s shoulder, towards the door. He half-expected, half-hoped a familiar, cocky grin would walk in right that second, toss out some lewd joke about Sam in his underwear and complain about the cramped quarters with Ruby, but nothing happened.

“ _Relax_.” Ruby whispered as she pressed her hand against his chest to keep him still. She didn’t seem surprised by his reaction. “He’s long gone, Sam. You were only awake for a couple of seconds before you passed out again but pretty boy said you did it. You _did it_ , you _saved everybody_.”

Sam rested his back against the cheap formica headboard and with a heavy sigh he let Ruby’s words sink in as her fingers idly grazed his skin. He sat there for a full minute and stared at the ceiling before he jerked free of her touch and swung his legs over the side, limping to the window with sleep-heavy legs. He could see his things- dufflebags, laptop, and clothes- neatly piled on the table in the corner, and as he pulled back the curtain he confirmed that the Impala was parked right out front.

Ruby watched him carefully as Sam stared out into the motel’s parking lot in his t-shirt, boxer shorts, and bare feet. “UNIT didn’t exactly back off after all of that,” she explained. “Jack cleared a way for us with the General at gunpoint, got us a jeep and told me to take you someplace safe. I slammed on the ignition and got the hell out of dodge, didn’t really think to ask if he wanted to stop by later for tea and cookies.” She tilted her head and wondered if any of this was registering but Sam just stood there with his eyebrows knit in determination. “I brought you here, found where you hid your car before you went all commando, ditched the jeep, and waited for you to wake up.”

Sam recognized the hitch in her voice. Ruby meant to point out that _she_ had been there for him, and not the man he couldn’t stop thinking about. He glanced back at Ruby lying on the bed, her hand buried in the sheets, her eyes half-lidded and inviting, then swung open the door and rushed out into the parking lot.

Ruby jumped off the bed and watched as her ward threw open the side door of the Impala and began to furiously search the passenger seat. She crossed the lot slowly while Sam scrambled, shooting a dirty look at a curious elderly couple until they went back to minding their own damn business. When she finally reached Sam he was slumped half-in and half-out of the car with two pieces of a busted phone in his hands and a look as if he’d lost something precious.

He met her gaze as Ruby’s shadow cut across him. “There’s um…no signal,” he said quietly as he let the pieces drop back to the floor.

Ruby rolled her eyes at Sam’s aborted attempt to find Jack. She waited until the elderly couple crawled into their beat up Ford and pulled out of the parking lot and then she reached into her leather jacket to remove a small thumb drive. “This came yesterday,” she said patiently. “Unmarked. It _could_ be nothing.”

Her caution was useless. Sam’s eyes lit up and he lunged for the drive and plucked it from her hand, racing back across the hot blacktop towards the motel.

“At least put on some pants!” she scowled.

Ruby followed him back inside and found Sam sitting at the table with his laptop, still in his boxers.

“You didn’t bother to check this out?” he asked anxiously, inserting the drive into the computer’s port.

“I don’t do technology,” Ruby dismissed, closing the door behind her.

Sam chuckled as he waited for his laptop to recognize the thumb drive. “What, all that demonic power and you’re afraid of a little computer?”

“When I was a human they hadn’t even invented the toilet yet.” She leaned on the back of Sam’s chair, watching a little window popup on his laptop.  “I don’t see the point of trying to figure it out now.”

Sam clicked on the icon of the drive with a smile and inside there was a single executable file labeled Torchwood.

“Huh,” Ruby mused, “I was expecting naked pictures.”

Sam scoffed, letting his arrow hover over the file. “Torchwood was Jack’s agency before he had anything to do with UNIT. He was trying to rebuild it again.” Sam wet his lips, staring at the file curiously. Was it a sign that Captain Jack had finally accomplished his task? Was Torchwood alive and well again?

“Is it supposed to do something?” Ruby inquired.

“I have to install it first.” Sam tapped the finger pad on his laptop nervously.

“…so?”

“So I have no idea what it is.” He turned to the demon behind him. “An executable file from a renegade Captain who’s traveled through space and time, and who’s probably seen super computers that make our most advanced technology look like a game of Pong.” He grinned.  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Ruby had no idea what Pong was. “Whatever.”

Sam shifted his attention back to the thumb drive and after another second of hesitation he opened Torchwood.exe and his screen suddenly went black. Then thousands of lines of code streamed across his screen in neither an alphabetical nor numerical language he recognized.

Suddenly Ruby wasn’t bored anymore. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” Sam confessed softly, his attention fixed on his laptop in a mixture of confusion and wonder. “ _I’ve never seen anything like this_.”

Then the codes stopped and a logo appeared. An electric blue T made out of octagons slowly rotated and Sam knew exactly what it stood for: Torchwood. _What was this_ , Sam wondered. Could it be possible that Jack had given him a piece of Torchwood, this thing the Captain was so proud of? Why?

When the logo disappeared, the screen went black again. There was a cursor at the top left hand corner and it blinked a few times before a message appeared:

_39° 40' 8.9112",-74° 46' 22.6158", 1500. Meet me._

Ruby stared blankly at the screen: puzzles, code, encrypted date, whatever happened to a good old blood seal? “Have you ever seen anything like _that_ before?”

Sam jumped to attention. He found a pen and quickly scrawled the numbers onto a napkin, afraid that they might disappear seconds later. “Latitude, Longitude, and military time,” he explained, glancing quickly at his watch. “Ruby where are we right now?”

“I didn’t go that far,” she said. “We’re just outside of Jersey.”

“Good, then I can make it.” Without another word Sam closed his laptop, threw on shoes, a pair of pants, tossed his things into the Impala, and hit the highway with all four wheels squealing. He picked up a cheap throw-away phone and used the gps to navigate to Jack’s coordinates, heading towards someplace in south Jersey.

Sam drove with his brother’s necklace tucked under the collar of his shirt, in his brother’s car with Dean’s overplayed copy of AC/DC’s _Back in Black_ in the cassette player and living his father’s life. For a long time he had resented his family’s burden. He had been looking for a chance to run; this chance encounter with Captain Jack had given him that opportunity but it was a short-lived freedom, and Sam wasn’t proud that he turned his back on Jack, or his brother’s memory.

Somewhere in between nearly dying from a virus and being rendered comatose for the Sententia, Sam had resolved to stop running. No doubt Ruby thought he was running away from her and straight into the Captain’s arms, but that’s not what motivated him. True, Sam had panicked a little when he thought that Jack was gone for good, but that was because he remembered what the Captain had confessed to him late at night in Montana. Once as Ruby and once as himself Jack had told the hunter that he rarely said goodbyes, and his words had stuck with Sam.

He’d met a lot of wonderful people traveling across the good old US of A and even a handful of women that he was sad to leave behind. Sam could probably look them up if he wanted to, but Jack was different; if _he_ wanted to disappear then Sam would never find him. Finally there was someone who might be even harder to track down than himself. Sam couldn’t bear to pick up his old life without closing this chapter, and to do that he had to see Captain Jack Harkness one last time. So he drove down the Garden State Parkway, following a cryptic set of directions in the hopes that he would get his chance to say goodbye.

His gps brought him just outside of a small town where two dirt roads intersected. There were empty fields in all directions except for a small church on the corner, so Sam pulled up alongside the dilapidated building to wait.

He got out of his car and stood at the center of the crossroads, looking down each dirt path until it disappeared into the horizon but he didn’t see another vehicle. He glanced again at his watch: 5 minutes past 3. Finally, he decided to investigate the little church.

Architecturally it was simple: a small single-story building with a sloping roof and three narrow, steepled windows on each side, but neglect had worn at the wood and left the ceiling open and rotted. Once made of brilliant yellows and rich reds, they were now shattered and dirty. Sam ducked inside the short entranceway, floorboards creaking loudly beneath his feet. He passed through a set of double doors into the main hall of worship where there were rows of rotting pews and an old wooden altar. It was dark, but there were holes in the roof, letting in rays of light as broken as the windows. It was just enough to make out a familiar figure in a dark gray coat lighting old votive candles beside the altar.

Sam moved down the center of the aisle, glass crunching beneath his feet. He paused to watch Jack carefully light each candle in a slow, reverential manner. “I didn’t realize you prayed,” he finally said, when all the candles had been lit.

Captain Jack blew out the match between his fingers and let it fall to the floor with the rest of the weathered debris. “I don’t,” he countered, watching the candlelight flicker and dance. “These are prayers from others, for long-forgotten people. I like to reignite their memory and watch the candles burn. Until there’s nothing left. Sometimes I even like to imagine who they might have been for.”

Sam joined the Captain at the altar. He noticed there _were_ three fresh candles burning alongside the others but he didn’t ask who they were for. They stood together in silence and watched until the shortest wick finally collapsed into a small pool of melted wax, and with one less yellow light to illuminate each other, Jack turned to him with a tender smile.

“You look good.”

“I’m alive,” Sam chuckled, shrugging his shoulders forward with both hands buried in his tan jacket.

Jack’s grin was wide and suggestive. “Not exactly what I meant, but I’m just as glad for it.”

Sam felt himself flush. He blamed it on the faint heat of the candles. “That was a funny way of getting my attention, with the thumb drive,” he began. “What did I just put on my computer?”

“That was Torchwood,” Jack announced proudly, “or a taste of it anyway. Installed on that dinky laptop of yours it gives you access to any wifi network within 200 miles. It automatically bypasses passwords and firewalls while encrypting your end. Figured you might be able to use it for all those dead spots driving cross-country.”

Sam nodded slowly. Jack had given him a gift, but he started to fear what that meant. “It was insane. I’ve never seen a computer do anything like that.”

“Because it’s alien,” Jack grinned. “Most of my technology is. See this?” He pushed up the left sleeve of his greatcoat to display the vortex manipulator around his wrist, flipping it open for the hunter to study. “Courtesy of the Time Agency. You can probably guess from the name that this little sucker used to carry me all over the universe. Most of those functions are a little, well, _fried_ , but it’s still good in a pinch.”

The Captain pressed a button and suddenly AC/DC started to blare from somewhere outside the church. Sam jumped in surprise but he recognized the album: it was the same one currently jammed into the Impala’s cassette player.

Sam laughed, his natural curiosity piqued by the strange technology. “You mean it’s still good for cheap tricks?” Captain Jack shut off the music with a grin and Sam studied him for a beat. “That means you got it fixed? No more tracking?” he asked, nodding to the manipulator. “I noticed the signal was dead.”

The Captain looked mildly surprised that Sam had just admitted to searching for him. It was a juicy secret to Jack, who was already strutting around like a peacock with its feathers on display.

“I had UNIT remove the tracker,” Jack said simply, shutting the manipulator and pushing down his sleeve.

“UNIT?” Sam queried. “The almost-destroyed-the-world UNIT?”

“I did some investigating of my own,” Jack explained. “General Erisa went to great lengths to hide what she was doing from the rest of UNIT. Turns out she was being funded by some corporate drug company so they could keep everything hush-hush. Across the pond, The Brigadier General used to be in charge but now that responsibility is left to his daughter. Cute girl. Spunky. Anyway, I brought this to her attention and they shut everything down.”

“Everything?” Sam asked dryly. “In two days?”

“In my line of work, things can disappear _overnight_. It was a mistake, and they erased it.”

“So you just took them at their word?” Sam pressed. “That they didn’t know.”

“ _They didn’t_ ,” Jack insisted defensively. “That can happen with different branches, it’s happened to Torchwood.”

Jack acted like there was some universal code between world-saving organizations. Sam didn’t get it; he didn’t want to. “And General Erisa?”

The Captain’s expression grew icy at the mention of her name. “They had her memory wiped, the last twenty years of her life. Last I heard she was flipping burgers somewhere in Virginia.”

Sam grimaced. After what the Sententia had put him through, memory wiping felt inexcusably invasive.

“It’s not my favorite method,” Jack assured him, noticing Sam’s recoil. “But it is kind, in its own way. She can still make something of her life, instead of sitting in prison.”

“What about the Sententia?”

Sam could feel Jack examining him, trying to get under his skin and understand what had happened, but Sam pulled his jacket tighter because he wasn’t going to explain.

“It slipped into a coma,” Jack said finally. “It was trying to do that to you Sam, but it backfired. Whatever happened in there you sent it to sleep for a long time which means the virus is neutral, for now. It’s in a different lab, one with people I trust. With time we’ll find a way to get that thing out of the population’s systems so if it does wake up again it’ll go back to being harmless.” Jack stepped forward, and lowered his voice. “The important thing is that you saved a lot of people.”

The Captain touched his shoulder gently. It was a reaffirming touch, probably meant to comfort him, but it reminded Sam of his dream - the way Jack’s fingers had dug into him, how he’d wanted to abandon him- and Sam couldn’t help the unconscious tremble that crawled up his spine. “Yeah,” he agreed quietly. “I guess that’s the important thing.” Jack’s hand fell away at the rejection. Sam didn’t look at him and changed subjects quickly. “Why did you give me that software?”

“I told you. I thought you might need it.”

Sam shook his head. “But it was _Torchwood_ software. You said Torchwood didn’t exist anymore.”

Captain Jack regarded him warily as if revaluating whether or not he could trust Sam.  When he had decided that he could, Jack overflowed with warm pride. “Torchwood is alive,” he confirmed. “The Brigadier’s daughter came through. They handed over everything General Erisa had confiscated and gave me more money than I know what to do with.” Jack tilted his head cockily. “I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

“You could build a secret lair,” Sam suggested with a sarcastic smile. “I hear that’s what all the superheroes are doing nowadays.”

Jack smirked, and then his expression became unreadable. “I used to travel with a friend, a long time ago, all over the universe. He could do anything he wanted but that’s what he chose to do, travel, maybe save the world every now and then.” Jack grinned wistfully, and Sam suddenly noticed the wrinkles around his eyes. “And he always brought someone with him.”  Jack met his gaze. “Sam. I want _you_ to come with me.”

There it was again, that phrase ‘come with me’ like it was something terrible and awful but exciting and wonderful all at the same time. Captain Jack was so rarely vulnerable but somehow, with this one little question, it was like he was tearing his heart out of his chest for Sam to see.

Sam shrugged helplessly. “Where?”

“Everywhere,” Jack grinned. “Anywhere. Torchwood doesn’t have to be confined to one place anymore. There’s a whole world out there with aliens and artifacts, maybe even a few devils.” Jack gave him a cheeky wink. “I want to show it to you, Sam. I want you to be there with me to see it.”

“But why me?”

“Who else?” The Captain laughed, and then launched into a rambling, breathless explanation. “You’ve already got years of field experience, you know how to handle yourself in a fight. I’ll have to update you on all the aliens you haven’t seen yet but there’s probably a thing or two you could even teach me. And…you’re brilliant Sam, you’re just brilliant.” Jack regarded him tenderly and Sam’s heart jumped in his chest. “Plus, I’ve been missing someone with a bit of tech knowledge. I even bet with some training I could get you up to the level of-”

“No.”

Jack stopped mid-explanation like someone had unplugged him.

“No,” Sam repeated apologetically. “I can’t, Jack. I’m sorry.”

Jack expression, once open, convivially and excited, slowly froze over like first winter’s frost.

“I’ve…got something I still have to take care of,” Sam elaborated, just to fill the perilous silence. “Lilith, the demon who held my brother’s contract and the reason he’s dead, she’s still out there. I’ve got to stop her Jack; I might be the only one who can.” He tried to return Jack’s fondness, his tenderness, because he did have warm feelings for the man, but in contrast to Jack’s invitation it felt like a cheap consolation prize. “I’m glad you finally got what you wanted. You’re not supposed to be cramped in some car with me; you’re supposed to be out there, saving the world. It’s where you belong.”

“I could help you,” he offered.

“I don’t want you to. This is something I have to do on my own.”

“ _With Ruby_ ,” Jack spat back bitterly. “She’s _using_ you, Sam, like you’re using her.”

Sam laughed because it might as well have been Dean in a greatcoat telling him off. He shook his head defiantly and shrugged. “I guess that’s my problem then isn’t it?”

He and Jack had been close, but maybe only through circumstance. Now there was a widening chasm between them and no matter what Captain Jack said or what he offered he knew he couldn’t pull Sam any closer. The Captain lowered his head in defeat.  “Just promise me that’s not the only thing you’re living for, Sam.”

There were birds chirping just outside the rotting church, the sound of another car driving past. Sam stared out an old stained glass window wondering what right Jack had to ask him that. He noticed through the grime and the dirt that the design on the window was of some martyred saint looking to heaven for supplication. The saint’s lower half was missing where the glass had broken, as if someone had gutted him to let the sunshine through.

“It’s not,” Sam promised. “Lilith isn’t the end. But to be honest, I haven’t given much thought to what I’m going to do when she’s dead,” he shrugged. “Maybe I’ll look you up. Until then…please don’t follow me.” He could see Jack was about to protest and Sam held up a hand to cut him off. “I’ve seen enough to know you could. All I’m asking is that you don’t.”

Jack considered this. He wanted to ask what Sam was so afraid he would find but he had pushed Sam far enough away, so Jack flipped open his manipulator again. “That software I gave you isn’t just a string of data and codes. It’s partly organic, alive. It has its own unique signature that allows it to communicate with the rest of the Torchwood software and…I just blocked it. Now you’ve got your own little oasis of alien tech.”

It was like receiving a Lamborghini for Christmas; Sam didn’t want it, or necessarily need it, but he guessed the thought was nice. He’d probably end up admiring it every so often but never take it for a spin. Still, he appreciated that Jack had done what he asked. “Thank you.”

“And I’m deleting your DNA sample,” Jack continued without glancing up, “your retinal scans, all of your stolen credit card records, your arrest records, motor vehicle records –do you ever plan on paying those outstanding tickets? There, all gone.”

Sam’s mouth hung open at the sheer _audacity_ of the man. “Okay. _That_ was creepy.”

“Basic protocol,” Jack smirked slyly. “For Torchwood employees.”

Sam lowered his gaze apologetically but when he saw the Captain step forward his eyes darted back up to Jack’s face, just as Jack reached out to cup Sam’s cheek with his right hand. The lapels of the Captain’s wool coat brushed against him as Jack pressed himself closer and smiled sadly up at him with ancient blue eyes. Sam’s pulse quickened but he waited patiently.

“Goodbye, Sam,” the Captain whispered and then leaned in to kiss him.

It was chaste and lasted only a few seconds before Sam felt the warmth of Jack’s hands fall away from him. He snapped his eyes open in surprise as Captain Jack stepped back. _Was that it_ , he wondered.  When Jack turned away from him Sam felt that same wave of panic like when he’d first woken up. It wasn’t enough. He had come all this way for some kind of closure and it wasn’t enough.

Sam reached out blindly and caught Jack by the lapels. Without another word he tugged Jack back towards him, cupping his face just like the Captain had done earlier and pulled him in for another kiss. Of all the things Sam had hidden from Jack: Ruby, his use of the demon blood and his steady addiction to it, he wanted _this_ to be honest. They had kissed while Jack was possessed, they had kissed while trying to save the world, but this meant more because he wanted it more, because he initiated it. He wanted Jack to know that he did feeling something for him, something that surprised him and that he hadn’t felt in a long time. He wanted him to know that he truly regretted not being able to say yes. So he tried to fit all of his passion and his contrition into his last kiss with Captain Jack Harkness.

Jack hesitated when Sam jerked him back but when he felt his lips, sloppy and a little desperate, he relaxed and let Sam kiss him deeply, draping his arms around the kid’s waist.

When Sam pulled back his face was flushed and his breathing was heavy. “The world always seems to be ending lately,” he observed. “Who’s to say I won’t see you during the next apocalypse?”

“Believe me it’s a not a new trend,” Jack smirked. He let his hands lewdly dip below Sam’s waist before he stepped back. “Go on,” he nodded curtly towards the exit. “Get the hell out of here kid.”

“Old man,” Sam smiled fondly before he turned and left the church. He got back into the Impala and for the sake of nostalgia he turned on the cassette player again. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell blared out into the countryside as Sam did a U-turn at the crossroads and headed back across the Jersey state line.

He left the church behind him, its rotting boards and its broken panes of glass and the immortal man who stood in the middle of them. The candles burning in their glasses had flickered and gone out, except for the three new candles that had just been lit. Somehow they burned slower than the others, and even when Captain Jack finally left they would continue to illuminate the dark void of the church like bright memories that refused to fade.

~~

The next day Sam woke up beside Ruby again with the late afternoon sun lazily filtered through half-drawn shades, leaving a pattern of golden bars that stretched across the carpet and onto the unkempt bed. Sam rolled over and pushed his sweat-soaked hair off to one side, studying the black-haired demon as she slept. Her bare arms were laid gently, palm-up on her paisley-patterned pillow. She didn’t need to sleep, Sam reminded himself, but she did look beautiful like this, naked beneath the covers, her breasts pushing back the duvet draped across her chest with every breath until her brown nipples peeked out shyly and then disappeared.

Sam threw back his own covers and stood, stretching.  He unscrewed a bottle of cheap whiskey from his nightstand and poured it into a tumbler, tipping his head back to drain the entire glass. He sighed happily as the burn hit him, aware that Ruby was watching him drink alone and naked.

“You’ve been restless all day,” she observed. “Something on your mind?”

Sam laughed bitterly, pouring himself another glass. “Can’t you guess?”

Ruby frowned, running fingers through her tousled sex-hair. “Handsome Jack. If I’d known you were into that Sam I would have possessed John Doe instead of Jane here.” She paused with a mischievous smile. “I guess I still could, if you’re not satisfied.”

Sam knocked back his second drink, gasping a little this time as it blazed down his throat. “That’s not what I mean,” he panted, setting aside the tumbler and rejoining her on the bed.

Ruby tucked her knees under her chin as the mattress sank under Sam’s weight. “Are you worried you made the wrong decision?”

“No,” Sam said gruffly, shutting his eyes. “I know I made the right one, but that doesn’t make it any easier.”

Ruby pushed the duvet away from her body and crawled towards him slowly until their skin touched. “You _did_ make the right decision, Sam,” she said softly. “You’re the only one that can kill that uber bitch.”

Sam rolled his eyes callously. “Honestly? I could have quit. To _hell_ with Lilith and hunting,” he shrugged. “I could have started over with Torchwood. Made something of my life you know? Maybe even been happy, eventually.”

Ruby’s eyes were dark, and Sam thought it was funny to watch her try to figure out what to say next. Eventually she leaned into him and placed her palm on his chest. “But you didn’t.”

Sam shrugged off her touch. “This thing that I’m doing with the blood?” he said. “It’s changing me.” Ruby opened her mouth to protest but Sam cut her off. “I’m not saying it’s for better or for worse but I’m not stupid, Ruby. I know it’s making me different.”

He turned his palm over and traced the major artery in his wrist as if he could pinpoint exactly where he became something other than human. “At first I thought I’d lose myself to this,” he mused. “I’d actually accepted it because sometimes I felt so _out of control_ , like I was drowning.” Sam looked back at Ruby intently. “But it’s not the blood that made me feel like that, it was the grief.” He bit his lip as the image of Dean being torn apart played over and over again in his mind like a broken record.

“That _thing_ ,” Sam growled, “that alien, whether or not it really got dragged into hell, its sole existence was to avenge someone who had died a hundred years ago. Because it could.” He narrowed his eyes and tilted his head. “And I realized that could have been me, _poisoning_ myself because I was too furious to focus on anything other than killing the bitch that killed my brother.”

“You were a little too eager to throw yourself into the flames,” Ruby agreed.

“When I kill Lilith,” Sam continued. “It can’t be for revenge. It’s got to be _bigger_ than that. That way I’ll have control over this…power. It won’t control me.”

Ruby sighed heavily. “What are you so afraid of Sam? Just because you have demon blood _in_ you doesn’t make you _evil_. Even your precious Jack told you that. I mean it’s nice that you want control but what we’re doing isn’t gonna make you go berserko or anything.”

“It’s not the demon blood I’m worried about,” Sam admitted quietly. “It’s how far I’ll go.”

He shifted on the mattress again, lying beside Ruby, his head next to her exposed hips. “I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of a pit and I don’t know why I haven’t fallen in yet because there’s a darkness that’s been a part of me maybe even since I was born. I can’t be sure if it’s human or demon.” Sam gazed up at Ruby, his eyes wide and frightened. “But it scares the crap out of me.”

Ruby coaxed his head into the gap between her thighs, gingerly brushing strands of hair away from his face. “What does that have to do with Jack?” she asked carefully.

“Because he’s not like Dean,” Sam said wistfully. “ _He’s like me_.”

Ruby remained silent, inviting him to continue.

“I think I first saw it in the grain warehouse,” Sam explained. “I should have left him there, but maybe I just didn’t want to admit what it was. I saw it again though, in UNIT’s lab, when he told me to drink the blood and go under.” Sam sat up again, clearly agitated. “I saw that he didn’t have any limits either. I saw guilt and pain from the decisions he felt he had to make that he could never forgive himself for.”

Sam licked his chapped lips slowly. “But he’s not on the edge like me Ruby, he’s already been to the bottom of that pit. He’s there right now. And I can tell there’s no turning back from something like that.”

Sam let out a ragged breath, his eyes starting to brim with emotion. “Jack already knew that if he let me meet the Sententia he would lose me, in more ways than one, and he chose to do it anyway. Because he had to, because he’s been there before.”

He grabbed Ruby’s wrist as she reached out to touch his face and squeezed it tight. “When he asked me to join Torchwood it felt like he was asking me to join him in that pit.” Sam clenched his jaw, tightened his fists and flexed his arms in angry refusal. “I don’t want that to be me, Ruby. _I can’t ever go that far_.”

Ruby watched him shake and shiver like a frightened mutt. She shushed him and brushed away a tear, parting his hair again to press a kiss to his forehead. She cradled his head and told him it would be alright. She told him this over and over again until he believed it and finally fell back asleep.

When he was asleep he didn’t see her smile, didn’t hear her snicker and laugh because _Ruby knew_. She knew that he _would_ go too far, that was the whole point of this after all: to groom Sam to become the perfect vessel for Lucifer. She would hold his hand while he set himself on fire and then he would ask who had done this to him while he held the match between his own fingers. But by then it would be too late, he would have already crossed that threshold he was so frightened of.

He would throw himself into the pit to lock up the devil and he would throw himself into the pit right alongside Jack Harkness. Of course it didn’t end then, that would have been too easy. Sam was brought back and he had to keep going with all of that regret and all of that pain, amassing on his shoulders day after day. He would finally get a glimpse of what Captain Jack Harkness had to learn the hard way: that life doesn’t end after death, like the highway it just keeps going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to thank everybody who gave this story/pairing a chance, to everybody who left a comment, a kudos, or even anyone who spent five seconds skimming a chapter. Thank you for being curious, thank you even more if you made it to this point.
> 
> I especially want to thank my beautiful, ever-patient beta [Jerseygirl324](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JerseyGirl324/pseuds/JerseyGirl324) who doesn't even like this pairing but put up with my craziness enough to point out all of my grammatical errors. I also want to thank [Cuda(Scylla)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Scylla/pseuds/Cuda) who is my Superwood bro, and who'se been a constant source of support and inspiration; thanks for wiping these last two chapters into shape!
> 
> I hope you've enjoyed getting your heart ripped out, as much I've enjoyed writing this. Kudos and comments are always appreciated, and if you're interested in seeing more Sam/Jack artwork and gifsets then feel free to check out [my tumbler](http://awabubbles.tumblr.com/tagged/SamxJack).


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